CompuServe Messages

For those interested, here's the full article from the Washington Post… Take Advantage of `Shareware,' But Pay Your Fair Share By T. R. Reid Washington Post Staff Writer Like world peace, honest government, a balanced federal budget, and the low-cal hot fudge sundae, the concept of "Shareware" is one of those sweet, sweet dreams that never quite come true. You may know Shareware by one of its aliases: Freeware, Honorware, User-Supported Software, etc. But the dream by any other name is just as sweet. The central idea is a sales transaction that turns the standard rules of buying and selling upside-down: The buyer, not the seller, sets the price of the product. Indeed, the buyer of a Shareware program has the right to pay nothing at all, if he decides the software isn't useful. There's a semantic distinction to note here. Shareware is not the same thing as "public domain software." A software program in the public domain is available for free. Generally, it's a program the author wrote for himself, found useful and is willing to share. In the early days of personal computing a decade or so ago, all software was public domain. As soon as any hacker developed a useful new program, he couldn't wait to pass it around to everyone else in the tiny community of microcomputer users. Then a brilliant young programmer named Bill Gates introduced Capitalism: He asked people to pay for his software. Because Gates had written the first useful PC version of the BASIC programming language, lots of people were willing to pay. Thus was born Gates' personal software firm – a modest little outfit called Microsoft – and the whole multibillion-dollar PC software industry. Shareware falls between public domain, or free, software and the decidedly private domain of big-ticket software houses like Microsoft. As with the public domain, Shareware programs initially are distributed for free – through user groups, or, more often, through telephone bulletin-board systems like CompuServe. But if the user finds the program valuable, he is honor-bound to pay for it – either the author's suggested price or whatever the buyer considers fair. Shareware prices are low – ranging from $5 to $50, for the most part – and some of the stuff is indeed junk. But many of these programs are markedly better than the high-priced alternatives in the purely private domain. In the MS-DOS world, the now-famous PC-WRITE, PC-TALK and PC-FILE, available on almost every bulletin board, are better than many commercial alternatives priced at $100 and up, but these Shareware products are priced (for those who choose to pay) at $35 each. Among the dozens of utility programs available for MS-DOS machines is the wonderful file-compression program called ARC. It will squeeze any file, or series of files, to a fraction of original size, thus saving disk storage space and speeding data transfer via modem. The suggested Shareware price is $15; the program is better than competitors costing 10 times as much. There is some wonderful Shareware out for the Macintosh, including Red Ryder, which is simply the most powerful modem program available for the Mac. With commercial software development still lagging for the Atari ST and Commodore's Amiga, the public domain and Shareware are still the most important sources for many basic utility programs. The principle of Shareware is so appealing that it ought to be extended to other fields of commerce. There should be a chain of Shareware Theaters, where you pay for your ticket on the way out: $10 if the show was great, $5 if fair, 15 cents for an absolute dog. Shareware Hospitals would trust the patient to pay in proportion to how healthy she felt when she walked out the door. If Congress were really serious about tax reform, it could create a Shareware Form 1040, with each household setting its own tax rate based on its evaluation of how effectively government had operated during the past year. None of this is likely to happen, though, because the sweet dream of Shareware isn't working in this hard, cold world. It's not that people don't like to use Shareware. It's just that they don't like to pay. A recent McGraw-Hill survey of program authors found that the average rate of return is about five paying customers for every 2,500 who try the program. This is a disgraceful reflection on the honor – or lack of same – of the average personal computer buff. We know of Shareware authors whose batting average is higher, but the fact remains that nobody is getting rich on Shareware. You owe it to yourself to check out the Shareware that's available. If you do, you owe it to your conscience to fulfill the obligations of honor and pay your share.