Pirates of Shareware

[sirthomas@aol.comyadayada (SirThomas)]

>     What are you and Herbert talking about? No one "pirates" shareware or
>freeware.

People "pirate" shareware when they continue to use a program they find useful
and don't pay the registration fee.

This happens a lot.  One specific case in the MS-DOS world, PKZIP became the
defacto standard program for compression; but, how many users actually sent in
the registration fees for the product?  Nobody I knew.  And I was part of a PC
user group that was over 100 members.

But they still gathered a few registrations.  Enough to stay in business.

Then you get the odd success like Jim Button of Buttonware.  Let's not forget
that Netscape started by giving away its browser for free!  Then, they got
smacked by MS and bought by AOL.  Hummm...  Success does come with a price.  :)

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"Is it not enough that you succeeded; must all others must fail as well?"

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