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Freeware for Windows -- Where Did It Go?
Talahamut asks: "The other day, I was planning on recording a radio show by running my stereo's output into my PC. Oooh, that sucks - WinXP's Sound Recorder limits you to 60 sec. recordings. Oh well, I'll just go online and grab a little WAV recorder. 30 minutes later, I'm frustrated because all I find is crippleware (time-limited, of course...) that records every format under the sun from any sound stream imaginable. What happened to the small home-brewed Windows utilities that used to be so easy to find online years ago? All the freeware sites I checked had nothing but commercial crippleware. Is there no place to find simple programs like that anymore?"
I remember there being lots of shareware that relied on your good will to send money to the creators.
:)
Perhaps the attitude of the article author that this was all "freeware" is why it has slowly changed to cripple-ware
THe thing about the cost on developing windows is not 100% true. You can download Microsoft's command-line C/C++/C# compilers for free, along with SDK's for developing Internet apps, GUI apps, database apps, and much much more. You have to pay for their IDE, debugger and for a local copy of the manuals, BUT you can do a whole lot for free. Don't forget either that the basic Visual C++/C# package is only $99. There's always GCC/Cygwin. You can install the free MS SDK, and then use any Cygwin development tools you like. Thing is, most windows developers actually LIKE Visual C++. It's really a great environment once you customize it (far less so than you need to customize Emacs).
Download.com and similar sites used to be good sources of freeware, but since they started charging to list your software, the freeware is gone; at best, the authors will want to recoup their listing fee.
The worst part is that they only charge the little guys. My company (big internet company) released a client-side application last year. Download.com approached us and offered to host it for free. They've served a ton of downloads and we've never paid them a cent. They even featured it for a while -- something we neither asked for nor discussed with them.
Yet the little guy that gets ten downloads a week actually has to pay for it...
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
It seems the problem is much older than that. When VB became popular, everyone who could make a dialog box pop up figured he or she could slap together some (usually) crappy piece of semi-functional-ware, charge $29.99 and become rich. It didn't help that shareware had been successful for a lot of products (mostly because the successful products were _good_). Shareware _is_ a great idea, but there is so much stuff out there which is complete crap, and you'll see 10 wastes of disk space for every app that is actually worth the 30 seconds to download.
My frustration is not so much finding free tools but finding _any_ tools that don't suck for small simple needs like the one described. I'll gladly pay a small fee for a small utility that does something really well, but the freeware actually tends to be better than the shareware in so many cases, probably because the creator is motivated to make a useful app rather than just become the next WinZip (which I happily paid for years ago, but now I use WinRAR, also paid for). Big commercial apps have their place, but most of the time, what I'm looking for is a simple tool to fill a simple need, not something that tries to be everything to everyone.
Between sourceforge.net and freshmeat.org and maybe a little learning curve with cygwin, there is plenty of good Windows open source software out there to be had, but it should be a lot better.
Recently I wanted a good font manager for Windows, something that would let me browse through hundreds of fonts and install or uninstall them quickly and easily. I found the same thing... a bunch of crappy shareware (or at best, decent shareware that lacked features I required), so in frustration I started writing my own using old Ziff-Davis free utility source code as a starting point. I haven't gotten far because of work demands, but if I ever get something good, I will release it Open Source.
And please, Windows programmers, if you are going to release freeware, give us the source. Many marginal piece of software could be very valuable if the source were available.
I have nothing against shareware or commercial software, but if you are going to go that route, your app better be worth the download, and from what I've seen, most aren't.
At the end of the day, any good software is hard to find.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.