CompuServe Messages

[Continued] The greatest successes in shareware have been fully functioning programs. GO ASPFORUM on here and check their organization out. For those who don't know, ASP stands for Association of Shareware Professionals. The members range from people like me (I've applied) who do this for a hobby, to folks like Chris Magee of AutoMenu (an IBM program) and others who have become millionaires from their shareware programs. The goals of the ASP are to promote SHAREWARE as a means of obtaining quality software, arbitrate between authors and users if there's a problem (if the author is a member), and to help authors out with information on distribution, programming (you can pick the brains of some of the best in the business), and marketing methods. There are only two requirements for membership in the ASP. #1, your program submitted for membership must be considered "non-trivial". Basically, that has been interpreted to mean "if one of us could hack it out in a weekend, it's trivial". #2, it and other programs you release must NOT be crippled. Non-crippled also means that full documentation must be provided on disk. The only differences allowed between trial and registered versions are that the trial versions can have reminder screens (not to exceed 2) which require not more than 3 keystrokes to get rid of, and which if autotimed, last no more than 3 seconds. Also, I belive that as part of the registered package, you are supposed to supply printed documentation. [More]