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Shareware conflated two different concepts that are now separated: the distribution model, and the pricing model. The distribution model was the genius of shar

by T-hawk 11y ago

Shareware conflated two different concepts that are now separated: the distribution model, and the pricing model. The distribution model was the genius of shareware at the time. In the days before the Internet and websites, physical distribution of the bits was a significant challenge. Shareware got the users doing the distribution work for the creator. Take this free version and copy and share it as much as you like. This succeeded very well, of course. But it's just outmoded now when anyone can toss up a website to host anything. The pricing model is alive and well, we now call it freemium. Offering a limited free version, with a paid upgrade for full features, has been successful all along and transitioned fine from the days of shareware to Internet-hosted distribution. Or the product was full-featured all along and just asked you to register on the honor system. That still exists too and we now call it donationware. So the "share" part of shareware has been superseded, but there are still elements of it in the modern software industry.

ben1040 11y ago
>The distribution model was the genius of shareware at the time. In the days before the Internet and websites, physical distribution of the bits was a significant challenge. Shareware got the users doing the distribution work for the creator. Take this free version and copy and share it as much as you like. That concept seemed to make better sense if you had people who were just handing disks around to friends. At that point the share part was clearer. What was always really annoying though was back in the late 80s/early 90s there were companies that basically existed just to duplicate floppies with shareware on them and sell them in stores. I remember going to a computer store and seeing a couple racks of floppies with games or home software for $10 or so. If you weren't familiar with the shareware concept you'd assume you got a great deal -- only to take it home and discover you paid money for a disk with a single piece of shareware on it, not a full license to the software. At least later on when companies started selling CD-ROM compilations with 600MB worth of shareware, it was more clear you were buying something to save you the trouble of downloading all that from a BBS, not buying a single piece of software.

by T-hawk 11y ago

ben1040 11y ago

>The distribution model was the genius of shareware at the time. In the days before the Internet and websites, physical distribution of the bits was a significant challenge. Shareware got the users doing the distribution work for the creator. Take this free version and copy and share it as much as you like. That concept seemed to make better sense if you had people who were just handing disks around to friends. At that point the share part was clearer. What was always really annoying though was back in the late 80s/early 90s there were companies that basically existed just to duplicate floppies with shareware on them and sell them in stores. I remember going to a computer store and seeing a couple racks of floppies with games or home software for $10 or so. If you weren't familiar with the shareware concept you'd assume you got a great deal -- only to take it home and discover you paid money for a disk with a single piece of shareware on it, not a full license to the software. At least later on when companies started selling CD-ROM compilations with 600MB worth of shareware, it was more clear you were buying something to save you the trouble of downloading all that from a BBS, not buying a single piece of software.