Freeware, Shareware and the value of software
There have recently been a lot of discussions about the value of software and about things like MacHeist or MacZot, or other software-giveaway things. Something i’d like to talk about in this post is the value of freeware software and the time invested in it.
UnPlugged and Camouflage are both freeware tools, i published them because i had the personal need to write these apps and i found, that other people would also be in a need of these apps. For both apps there were alternatives available but these alternatives didn’t work as i expected them to work, and i realized that they shouldn’t be too hard to make them on my own. I made the apps and when they were working properly i was using them. For me these apps were fine and doing exactly what i wanted. As i realized that other people may like these apps too, i published them.
Both apps are just small and were only made to solve one small issue i was having with my mac, so i released them as freeware, also because i didn’t put THAT much work into them. So personally for me the development of these apps was over. I spent maybe a weekend or less to build them. But after i released the apps i received a lot of feedback. Some bugs, but most were feature requests. As i really like feedback and as i also like to help other people, i added these features, if they were making sense. In the end i was spending WAY more time in adding these feature that other people were requesting, than it took me to create these apps in first place. I really like improving my software and i also really like to add features i would have never thought of (like disabling Camouflage to reveal the icons again 😉 ), just because it makes me happy to improve my apps and to help other people that are using these apps.
So if you are using freeware software, no matter if mine or anyone from else, please keep in mind, that these apps are free because the developers feel that they should release them as freeware. The developer puts a lot of time in these apps, even though he may not require that work on his own. I’m developing this software in my free-time and my free-time is not always much, but still i try to work on my apps, even on the freeware apps.
If some developer decides to make his freeware to shareware, then this is his own decision and no-one should complain about this. Developing software takes a lot of time and sometimes is not easy, so please respect these decisions. If you don’t like the price compared to the new features you get from the new version, you can still use the old version, no-one will remove that from your hard-drive. The changes from one version to the other may not only be visual changes. Keep in mind, that the user-interface is only a fraction of the whole application and you may not notice all the work that has been spend on that update. If the user-interface didn’t change much, then maybe because it’s still sufficient for the task it has to fulfill.
Keep in mind, software is not yet done by computers, it’s done by human beings, people like you and me. There’s always a human siting at the other side with his own life. And send in feedback! Feedback is the only thing that keeps software evolving. Without feedback we developers soon run out of ideas how we could improve our apps. 😉
Karsten
January 9th, 2007 at 22:16
Nice article. I like much of what you say about why a publisher/developer may decide if his work will be freeware, shareware or other. Our site is free for users because we learned that “community-based” applications where users interact or communicate with other users is best developed as a free service. For example LinkedIn. The success of a site like ours has more to with how many users are involved than how much they pay. Payment could be a barrier for some so we just took the idea out of the equation. Any thoughts or comments for us?