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Comment by halviti | Hacker News Reader

Shareware is not dead, but I would say the term 'shareware' is.

These days it's just software. You have free software that gives you a limited user experience or timed trial to decide if you want to buy the full thing.

Look at any app store and look at the free rankings. It's practically full of nothing but "lite" versions that only exist to give you some features to help you decide whether you want to pay for the full version.

If anything 'shareware' is more alive than ever although it goes by different names these days, 'lite', 'freemium', etc.

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The idea behind the word "shareware" is that you "shared" the demo version with your friends, and anyone who wants to buy a licence can.

So now that we get everything from a direct download, it makes sense that the term "shareware" is no longer used. The concept of having the demo spreading organically as people share it is gone.

Isn't invite-only software a similar concept?

Invite-only software (or service) is just a hidden social network.

I dunno. I mean, I tell everybody who will listen to me about CamScanner, a free app that scans documents to PDFs on your phone (android and ios). It saves me tons of time, and I share it with people - granted, they download it on their phone, but it's almost the same thing.

I guess if you look at the social construct, it's similar, but in terms of distribution, bittorrent is probably the closest...but not as similar in terms of license ;-)

Dunno, plenty of stuff that still depend on word of mouth even if it is sitting in an app store somewhere.

Plenty of stuff i'm using on Android i found via people mentioning it on various forums etc.

Right, thinking about it, it could still work with very popular things like TV series. You release the whole season with bit-torrent to save bandwidth and marketing costs. Then after watching the first two episodes you have to pay for the rest. Sure there's no tech for that today, but hey startup idea!

There absolutely exists tech to do this now. Someone with access to google to knock together a prototype today.

The issue is trust and control. The rights holders (not always the same people as the content creators) don't trust the consumer and want to retain control.

Isn't this kind of what they're doing on Google Play, or what was done with Mr. Robot, minus the torrent? The first episode or two are free, then you either pay per episode or watch via TV subscription. I frequently download free pilot episodes to see if there are any shows I might be interested in watching. I would say that Mr. Robot was a great example of this. I heard about the show by word of mouth (it might have been here, or possibly on Reddit). I do not watch any other shows on USA, so it is likely that I would have never heard of the show had I not had the pilot recommended to me and easily available to watch on YouTube. I think that last part is key. I probably would not have made the effort to download a "USA" app, or jump through hoops to watch it on a web browser. Having it easily available on my phone where I could watch it with the built in YouTube app was perfect.

Google Play does this occasionally, yes. I wish they did it a lot more often. Pilots of every series should just be free, everywhere, IMHO.

My idea is that you share the whole season with "friends" on torrent and other file-sharing sites. Not only the free episodes. You download the entire season! This takes care of both distribution and most of the marketing. You of-course release it with the highest quality! And you do not need any infrastructure whatsoever to do this.

As in the spirit of shareware, you let people watch some of the episodes for free, then charge for the rest. And that's the part some smart people has to figure out.

An idea is to have the content encoded differently depending on the Internet routes. And some type of block-chain that would give you a key to decode the data, depending on a voucher code you insert to the chain.

You could argue that something like Sublime Text is Shareware, even though they don't use the term. You can download it, and the trial period never expires. So you use it without paying if you are a lame person, much like in the shareware days.

Agree, this seems to be a modern interpretation of this. Charles (http://charlesproxy.com) does this pretty successfully. They let you use the full app, but only run for a 30 minute block.

>The idea behind the word "shareware" is that you "shared" the demo version with your friends, and anyone who wants to buy a licence can.

Not many people did that even at the time. Most people got their shareware from magazine disks, BBS, early internet shareware sites (TuCows, VersionTracker, CNET downloads, etc), and even the mail. So it's not like "sharing between friends" was essential to the market (the name "shareware" was a coincidental result of a magazine contest asking readers to find a generic name for this type of software).

And, as you say, it doesn't make much sense now either, because we have the internet. If someone wants, he can just send a link to a friend to download it himself (or 10 other ways of "recommendations").

I depends what you mean by shareware too.

There were many who only considered software to be shareware if it was fully featured and non-expiring whether you paid or not, operating on an honour system. Search for "Association of Shareware Professionals" who were a group actively evangelising this approach. Anything else was referred to by them as demoware (or sometimes as the overly negative (IMO) term "crippleware"). Most of what you see in app stores would not fit this definition because features are missing or limited in the free versions. "Nagware" was usually "permitted" under the definition, if the request for license/donation wasn't obtrusive (i.e. no messages boxes that blocked operation and couldn't be closed until a timeout has passed).

There are some current examples that probably qualify for the above description. SublimeText is the only one that springs immediately to mind but I'm sure there are others of significance I'm forgetting.

Apps that are ad-sponsored but otherwise complete until you pay might be a grey area. Back when this discussion was happening "in my earshot" this part of the modern market simply didn't exist (at least not in anything like its current form).

>You have free software that gives you a limited user experience or timed trial to decide if you want to buy the full thing.

"Free software" is already a well defined term, and it does not mean this.

https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

As much as I like the GNU philosophy, Free [as in price=0] Software is perfectly valid as well.

Yelling at clouds doesn't make them go away. The word "free" meaning "no cost" has been around a lot longer than GNU has.

Re-defining what "free" means is an uphill battle, and not everyone agrees with this effort.

On a cultural note, it's fun to be aware that GNU doesn't mean the software must be costless. It's perfectly valid to sell an OSS for a fee, but you are required to provide the source code and your customer is free to sell/share it again. It's even written on the FSF's FAQ. I guess if you make something sufficiently "trade secret", your customer won't share it with the rest of the world.

This might be true for the mobile market, however the PC market is a different beast entirely.

On the PC you still get 30-day trials for professional software or apply-for-private-use-licence-leave-an-email models.

It's not quite the same as the eternal winzip install on millions of PCs, but some people still make money that way.

Actually Sublime Text is a prime example for the WinZip model: you can use it with no limitations, but only for evaluation. You're meant to pay if you keep using it but other than a nagging popup and a note in the window title there are no restrictions.

The Reaper DAW (digital audio workstation) is another example. There's actually a lot of such 'nagware' in the audio world.

I don't think I've seen someone type the word shareware in about 3 or 4 years. I don't think I've heard someone say shareware in at least fifteen years.

But I think you're absolutely right: the spirit is there, it just goes by a different name.

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