SwitchBlade is on a rant - this time it is about the decline of shareware and rise of low quality shareware and freeware. Remember the days of the Atari and Amiga? So does SwitchBlade and the comparison with today is not favourable.

"Back in the day" or "Whatever happened too..

Now I may be showing my age a bit here (eek), but back in the late 80s early 90s, where the Atari ST reigned supreme and Amiga never realised how useful MIDI ports were, a fair few strange ideas as per software registration came about. Prime examples are postcard-ware, beermat-ware, beer-ware, freeware and shareware. Beer-ware (one of my personal favourites) involved you sending a bottle (or can) of some obscure local ale to the software author, as with shareware and freeware you got the *FULL* program, not a time limited one, not one with missing levels/features, the *FULL* app, and it was your obligation to register if you liked it. Lo and behold it was proven this method worked and I saw photos of an app developer with his beer bottles all round him from where people "registered" there software via beer.

Now we jump forward a decade and some change, what do we see, beer-ware, postcard-ware and their friends are gone *sniff*. Freeware has almost dissappeared, and shareware has been polluted into some sick shadow of it's former self. I'm most annoyed in the change of shareware, your app is a butchered version of itself, if you register (for a sum of money far higher than the old "send us a fiver" registration fees) instead of getting something extra for your money, you only get access to the full app. *gets off the milk crate, puts another one on top, then climbs back on top* I thought for a while this was just something that was limited to the morons coding apps for the windoze platform, you didn't see this kind of backstabbing in the Linux community, old style shareware apps are still coming out for the Atari and Amiga systems (surprisingly), the old shareware values held true to BeOS. Therefore I felt it safe to assume that on the Symbian platform (after seeing my mate get plenty of shareware and freeware for his old Psion Series5) the same values of shareware would hold true. Here we are with our beloved Nokia 9210s, 7650s, and soon SonyEriksson P800s, and we are being treated to "shareware" by the same twisted individuals as on the windoze platform.

*rant over, steps off of milk crates. Jumps back on milk crates*

Big shout to the FreEPOC crew and everyone producing quality freeware for the 9210, and anyone who holds true to the old shareware ideals.

*Police escort from the milk crates for causing a public disturbance*

NB I have plenty more rants and raves where that came from, and I'm not scared to post them once weekly as news items! *sees Rafe quickly revoke my access to posting news*

Editors Note: As you can see from this being moved to the news section Rafe is a kind and enlightened (wonderous etc. etc.) admin who lets people do almost anything...