Re: shareware ideas??

Speaking as one of the Legion of Bastards who never pay for shareware, I'm skeptical about this being a money-making venture. However, there have been surviving shareware companies in the past -- for example, Ambrosia wrote great shareware games for the Mac. If you can distribute a useful, non-crippled subpart of your application for free, then charge people for the rest of the program plus documentation, you might have a chance. Speaking from personal experience, giving someone a broken but complete version is just inviting them to "fix" it.

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Re: Re: shareware ideas?? by theorbtwo (Prior) on Jun 27, 2002 at 07:10 UTC
Remember, give away the razor; sell the blades. The most common way of doing this in the software world is to give away the engine and sell the data, as in games. iD software pioneered this (Commander Keen) and still does it. (Of course, the line between "program" and "data" gets fuzzier with every release.) We are using here a powerful strategy of synthesis: wishful thinking. -- The Wizard Book	[reply]

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Re: Re: shareware ideas??
by theorbtwo (Prior) on Jun 27, 2002 at 07:10 UTC

Remember, give away the razor; sell the blades. The most common way of doing this in the software world is to give away the engine and sell the data, as in games. iD software pioneered this (Commander Keen) and still does it. (Of course, the line between "program" and "data" gets fuzzier with every release.)

We are using here a powerful strategy of synthesis: wishful thinking. -- The Wizard Book

[reply]