I’m not talking about shareware or trialware but 100% freeware. Some of them are quite good that I’m looking for a catch to this.
There’s no ads or installed programs beside the game as I use custom install (there’s a diff here). That’s obvious of course but are there hidden programs?
Doesn’t seem like it but I guess I’ll never know but I’d like to know if I sold my soul for them. :rolleyes:
Exposure. Some people just want to get their stuff out there so people can see it, contact them, and pay them money to write more stuff. Remember, Doom was free when it was first released… that worked out pretty well for them.
Malware.
Viruses.
But mostly exposure.
About 30 years ago I wrote a program which I have been distributing as free open-source software since then. It’s quite popular and is used by literally (yes literally) millions of people. I don’t know how to say this without sounding sappy or sanctimonious, but I do it simply out of the goodness of my heart. It makes me feel good to know that so many people find my work useful. And maintaining and improving the program is a kind of hobby. It’s fun. I have never gotten any paid work as a result of this software and I don’t expect I ever will. Obviously different people may have different reasons for distributing free software, but I know a number of people who do it for basically the same reasons I do. It’s somewhat related to the Hacker Ethic, although I don’t subscribe to every principle that falls under that rubric.
“Exposure” is just a ploy unethical cheapskates use to try to con people into working for free.
And Doom was released as shareware. The first level was free, but you had to pay if you wanted the full game.
There are a number of approaches:
Some developers are paid to make free software, because the company which hired them uses that software and wants to improve it, and doesn’t want to (or legally can’t) take it on as a completely internal project.
For example, let’s say IBM wants to use the Linux kernel. It wants to make sure Linux is high-quality and runs on IBM’s hardware, such as z Series mainframes. IBM decided that the best way to meet both of those goals is to pay people to contribute to Linux development. There are two reasons for this:
One, Linux is not public domain. The code in Linux is owned by the contributors, as a collective work, such that each contributor* owns their own input and has released it under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The GPL states that if you distribute a work licensed under the GPL, you must make the source code available to everyone you distributed it to with no further restrictions. IBM could ignore this by making a special IBM-only Linux version, to which it applies all of its patches (code modifications) and never distributes into the world. That would be a bad idea for two reasons: One, IBM wants it customers to be able to use Linux on its hardware so it needs to distribute those kernels, and, two the next reason…
*(Individual programmers in the case of hobbyists or people who are employed to contribute but did not assign their copyrights to anyone else as a term of their employment, companies in the case of people who were hired to contribute and did assign their copyrights to their employer.)
Two, IBM doesn’t want to have to keep re-applying its patches (for functionality and hardware support) to the mainline Linux kernel. That would be a massive waste of effort, because it would have to go through the codebase line by line and ensure that those patches would apply cleanly to the latest kernel version. It wants to get those patches accepted by Linus Torvalds and have the entire Linux kernel development community ensure they remain functional as the rest of the kernel changes over time. Therefore, IBM is motivated to release its code, and to play nicely with the kernel development team, because, as big as IBM is, Linus Torvalds is ultimately in charge, and Torvalds isn’t an IBM employee.
(Could IBM fork the kernel and cut Torvalds out entirely? Yes, that’s the final recourse of the Open Source/Free Software world. However, see the first point: Most Linux kernel code isn’t owned by IBM, will never be owned by IBM, and will always be under the GPL, so IBM would still have to distribute full sources to its Special IBM Linux Kernel No Linus Allowed.)
And IBM isn’t alone. A lot of companies contribute to the Linux kernel, all under the same terms as IBM. They all have perfectly reasonable profit-seeking reasons to write code which will be given away for free.
Wow, that is interesting. Thanks guys.
There is quite a lot of freeware around that just relies on people recognising the value and sending them some cash. Wikipedia is a famous example; Tor is another. Basic software like AVG is free but comes with regular nags to upscale. This seems to be the most popular option for developers. There are also free games, notably on FB, that work fine and without restriction, but want you to buy stuff to speed-up/enhance the game.
Consider Google Maps. You and I get to use it for free. There aren’t even any ads. (Well, there are some ads, but they are kept so unobtrusive that I usually don’t notice them.) And they keep adding more and more features to it. How can they do this? How do they pay their developers? My understanding is that they get their money from selling hyper-advanced versions to businesses, such as TV weather reports.
Search for “Google business model” for more info. Other industries do it too. Consider the previews of books that you can read on Amazon or on Google Books. You can sample major sections of the books you’re interested in, and it has often been enough to answer the question I’m researching. But many pages are off-limits, and you can’t copy-paste the text either. They are literally letting you use the book for free, and they get money from the few people (including me, sometimes) who actually buy the book.
Software (when distributed over the internet) is unique in that manufacturing and distribution costs are zero. Development is a real expense, and advertising often costs also. But it is ridiculously easy to turn off a few key features and give it away for free. I remember once seeing that Microsoft offered a free version of Word. It was genuine, and it was (almost) full-featured. You could start from scratch, or open an existing file, and make whatever changes you wanted, no matter how advanced the feature was, and even print the document when you were done. There was exactly one thing that it would not let you do, and that was to Save the file when you were done. You could leave the document open on your screen as long as you wanted, but if you had to reboot or you lost power, the document was gone. What an incredible advertising method! It’s like test-driving a car, where you do whatever you want with the car, even take it home or out of state or even get in an accident, as long as you keep the engine running.
So I ask the OP: Yeah, I know that what you have isn’t shareware, but is there a more advanced version that they hope you’ll buy? If yes, there’s your answer. If no, then I guess the author is a hobbyist like others have written.
And then there’s “capital F” Free Software like GNU which is developed by people who deeply believe software should be free (as in speech.)
Please explain what this sentence means. ISTM the innards of your question and answer lie somewhere in whatever it is you’re trying to communicate here.
Using custom install means I can choose what or what not to install programs. They includes programs like toolbars and such.
My question concerned free full fledged software such as utilities and games. Games especially because I like to download them.
Games like (from Game Top site) 4 Elements 2, Crime Solitaire and Real Poker. I used to like Hidden Objects games a lot but lately my eyes are aging. If you like games check out 4 Elements, lots of fun.
Match 3 games gets old. Still lots of games that’ll keep you busy.
By the way, look at this game. Graphics, music, stories. All commercial grade stuff.
Increasingly, games are moving toward the “free to play, expensive to play well” model where the main game is free, but some of the content is not. For example, Star Trek Online is a free MMORPG (which I just started playing), but if you want the best ships and equipment you generally have to pay real money for them. You can also pay to get extra in-game resources and for access to certain game content.
Yep.
I use a piece of ebook catalog software called Calibre, that allows me to easily store, search, and read my ebooks on my computer. I’ve been using it for quite a few years now, and relatively early on, i sent the developer some money through PayPal.
That’s sort of true, although there are ads on Google Maps.
There are customers who pay directly for Google maps use. One might be another app developer who wants their app to have a map-based feature within it. You get a certain number of API hits on the map data for free. After that, you pay.
But, in a broader sense, none of those really pay for Google Maps. What pays for Google Maps, or Google anything, is advertising, since that’s where the vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from. For strategic purposes, they don’t always show ads on every product, but they often use the data garnered from those products to improve advertising elsewhere.
Another reason why someone might be paid to create free software is if a company or other client wants a particular tool for their own use, and doesn’t care if anyone else also has that tool. Similarly, a programmer might want a particular program for themself, and once they’ve written it for themself, why not share it?
I do this. Though it’s usually not something I would feel right charging for.
I know other freeware software that is about licensing the engine. So it’s basically a demo of what you can do with their software.
There’s also just a ton of retro software that the developers don’t care to monetize anymore. GOG kinda changed that market a bit by setting up a market, but there’s still a lot of stuff like that out there.
Open Office started as an open source project in Germany. Than Sun bought them in order to have a standard office package for Solaris and also as competition for Microsoft on Windows. So some software can be free to you but serves a business purpose for the funding company or companies.
And if they open-source it, they have some hope of getting other developers to contribute code to the codebase without being paid, which is more hope than if they keep it to themselves.
And, yes, I’ve released a few little pieces of software I wrote to scratch a particular itch I had. I developed it with Open Source software, so keeping it to myself would be weird.
There’s also the cultural aspect: Developers expect the basic programming language implementations (not the IDEs, but the compilers and runtimes and core libraries) to be Open Source, and released under a realistic license (as opposed to some weird ad hoc license which allows you to look at the source but disallows distributing modified versions or something) so they’re not going to be locked into a specific vendor’s software just to use a specific language.
A company that develops a programming language really, really wants developers to use it, so a community forms around it and more tooling and libraries are developed for it and there are blogs and informal documentation written about it and it becomes an established alternative in the development universe, as opposed to some weirdo language this company developed and nobody uses because it’s all proprietary and nobody uses it.
(Some companies in some industries can get away with completely locked-down proprietary language implementations for which no Open Source implementation exists. They’re… off in their own world, from the perspective of most of the industry.)
Anyway, an example of this is Microsoft opening up their implementations of C# and the .Net world in general, which is kind of an odd move because Microsoft once called Open Source “cancer” and because .Net only exists because Microsoft lost a lawsuit when it tried to develop an incompatible implementation of Java and Sun sued their sorry asses for misuse of the “Java” trademark.