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There is a fascinating article about the effectiveness of crippling shareware versus relying on goodwill at http://www.scrawlsoft.com/products/common/hardnose .html.

The short summary: He did a study using a Windows shareware program. Upon installation, it randomly chose whether to be crippleware or simply remind the user to pay when starting and quitting the program, with a 50% chance of each. It did this in such a way that reinstalling wouldn't randomly choose again, so most people didn't even realize there were two "versions". The crippled version sold over five times as many copies.

Granted, this is a single example and may not be representative of all situations, but it's the best study I'm aware of so far. It puts the "people who will buy it will pay for it anyway, don't piss people off by crippling the product" position in serious doubt, at least in my mind.

Go right ahead... Provide some basic evidence that shows that P2P is eating lots of sales, and I'll agree with you. However, so far, I have not seen any such study. The RIAA is the only one that has made that claim, and their own evidence partically contradicts them.

This is a bit suggestive. The honor system doesn't work.

I found this interesting experiment concerning shareware registration/payment and I think it has some bearing on discussions about music copying, file trading and sharing.

The same experiment is also related here.

What it shows is that people were 5 times more likely to pay for the shareware when they were made to pay versus relying on the honor system. So when the shareware was "free", only 1/5th of the time was the author paid for his work.

The extension of this result into the discussion of music sharing I think is obvious.

"Crippleware" works, "traditional" shareware doesn't. One shareware author documented a 5-to-1 difference in the matter.

You can read more about Ambrosia's take on the matter here.

The terms are intermingled, sir.

Each of the definitions I provided has its terms of use and its manner of distribution.

With shareware, you are encouraged to distribute (share) the software as widely as possible, as you are with commercial demos.

Agreed. And THAT is the definition of shareware. That you can share it and that a substantial amount of the functionality is there so you can try before you buy.

The difference is that with a commercial demo, standard functionality is not enabled without payment, whereas with shareware, all functionality required to use the software is present, and the honor system is used to secure payment. If you can't afford the software, for example, you can still use it.

I disagree. Nowhere is it written that shareware has to use the honor system to secure payment. Likewise, I've seldom (if ever) seen shareware that says "Use this for free, but if you want, pay me."

In fact, shareware is software that can be distributed in its unregistered form without any threat of legal action against the person doing the sharing.

By your definition, commercial software and shareware are the same thing. So why not call it what it is?

Well, I agree with you there. Shareware, in this sense, IS commercial software. The only difference is the distribution method. Traditional commercial software comes in a shrink-wrapped package that you pick up at Best Buy, shareware is shared around the net for distribution.

But, yes, shareware is commercial software. And I'm sorry if the definitions I provided in my previous message suggested otherwise because I have always believed that shareware is commercial software. It's just distributed in a non-traditional way.

People are encouraged to copy and share the software for evaluation, then users of the software are encouraged to pay for it." Note the wording: encouraged, not forced.

Well, that's certainly open to interpretation.

Nag screens and increased functionality when the software is purchased is just "additional encouragement" and doesn't violate the quote you cited.

Perhaps expireware might go beyond your quote in spirit, although again it DOES still fit the description since the fact that the software expires is just one more way to encourage the user to purchase the software.

The fact is, the quote above doesn't indicate that the author can't implement designs that encourage more users to purchase the shareware.

And, in light of the fact that 80% of users will not purchase shareware if they don't have to, I think working on the honor system is just foolish. You might as well just call it freeware and be done with it.

Perhaps we treat customers like thieves because 80% are. Perhaps customers are feeling the backlash from developers who have been taken to the cleaners for too long by a public that is used to stealing their software.

To claim that programmers will feel a backlash from the public is silly; our actions are DUE to what the public has already done. If the public now is pissed off because of what has to be done to force a little bit of honesty on them, tough luck. The public had their chance with non-expiring shareware that wasn't crippled and didn't have nags. The public didn't buy. So now they have to deal with these issues.

What pisses me off, as a shareware author, is not so much that a hacker will crack my program--I figure if they want to put in the time to get around my security then they've earned a free copy and probably invested more time than what it would have cost to buy the program. What pisses me off is when they then stick that on Gnutella as if they were doing a service to the community. That's just BS.

In part I blame the big players, such as Microsoft, Adobe, etc. They've been selling software at such inflated prices for so long that people don't think twice about "sticking it to the man" and installing a pirated copy. I figure that's what Microsoft gets for selling software at inflated prices.

It's sad, however, that some people will then proceed to crack or "share" a $5 or $10 shareware program. Pirating a $400 copy of Word and not paying a multi-billion dollar company with constant profits is not the same thing as pirating a $10 program and not paying an honest programmer that's just trying to earn a decent living.

This was a very important study in its time and in fact, I haven't heard of any other serious research done in this subject since it was released.

The actual rate (at least in the study I know, maybe you are referring to another) was 5 to 1. There is probably a good reason people didn't do this again - the author (Colin Messitt) concluded the experiment cost him 17K is lost sales.

You can read it here , among other places on the net.

The nice folks at ScrawlSoft had a Z-Machine interpreter, YAZI, four years ago. One of the few third-party Newton widgets worth the sharware fee; it has lots of little buttons and shortcuts for the most popular words, command history, quick cut'n'paste from the output window... makes it almost as easy to play as if you had a keyboard.

And, of course, the shock value of telling your fellow geeks that you were playing "Suspended" on your MessagePad 130 back in 1997 was well worth the price of admission.

I keep pestering them to open the source up, since the project stalled at 2.0b4 when the platform died and still has a couple cosmetic bugs, but they seem to have stopped caring, sigh...

In any case, YAZI can be found at the ftp.gmd.de site mentioned elsewhere, as well as at ScrawlSoft's YAZI Beta Page.

Weird that this article was posted; I was just downloading a fresh mess of .z5 and .z8 games to my MessagePad last night before I went to bed....
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can you imagine trying the following on a cel phone (teensy screen, awkward at best text input):

The Thing Your Aunt Gave You Which You Don't Know What It Is contains:
Satchel Fluff
Pocket Fluff
Cushion Fluff
Jacket Fluff
An Atomic Vector Plotter
A Hyperwave Pincer

>get fluff from thing
Which fluff do you mean? Satchel Fluff, Pocket Fluff, Cushion Fluff, or Jacket Fluff?

>get satchel fluff from thing
Satchel Fluff: taken.

as if it's not hard enough to do in YAZI on my Newton MessagePad and that has a tappable keyboard and automatic word expansion.

Extra points to those that can identify the game :)

For more fun with accelerometers, check out what Scrawl Software did with a Newton, an accelerometer, and Canobie Lake amusement park.

A Pilot version of this hack would be even more usable!