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Unrestricted vs. Limited Shareware, In Dollars
mklopez writes "There is a belief in the online world that people will be more willing to compensate an author for a downloaded program that has full functionality, versus paying to unlock features in a shareware version. Someone actually put this idea to a test with surprising results."
The result of this study is rather unsurprising to me. What is suprising is that this fairly trivial piece of software, created entirely for the purposes of this experiment, earned its author $34,075 in one year. Wow. And there was probably a good deal more money to be made if it always ran in restricted functionality mode.
Now, granted, he has an established company, so he probably has some good connections with download sites and magazines to get his program included, but that's a tidy sum for "a couple of days" of work.
...because you get full use of the application. This is important if you are doing serious evaluation. And let's be realistic--if you are seriously evaluating a program, you should be able to effectively do so within the time limits as long as the time limits are reasonable. And if you really need to run over the time limit, Try contacting the company and ask them to extend it. Many (but not all) companies are more than willing to work with you if you are serious about evaluating their program.
I think we can all admit that we have, at one time or another, used a less-than-legal copy of software. Many times, it's a one-shot "need", but in many cases, it's to evaluate a program that's otherwise crippled. And for me, there are many, MANY times when the ability to have unrestricted use led to purchases.
-Jim
http://jimstips.com/
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Here's SmartDoc, the actual program used in this experiment, and a screenshot It certainly looks pretty basic.
I work in the public sector, and I have a sizable budget for IT expenses. I can justify expenditure on just about anything simply by saying I need it. However, the purchasing department wouldn't let me give money to a project if I can get the same software free of charge. We're very carefully audited to make sure our software is licensed, but if the license permits usage at no cost then there is no way we can justify giving a donation. We would be in big trouble if we were found to be `wasting' taxpayers' money in this way.
Even in the private sector, a corporation has a legal responsibility to its shareholders to reduce costs, and runs the risk of being sued by them if it donates money unnecessarily.
Neither public nor private organizations are allowed to be charitable with their patrons' money.
(Hiya, I'm the author of TFA and Bingo Card Creator). Here's the closest OSS program to my software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/ . Feel free to use it if it fits your needs better. (I'll be perfectly honest: I think I do a much better job. For example, I have features such as "actually runs on a Windows PC instead of crashing on install" and "prints without leaving the program". If I didn't think I could do a better job than what was available for free, I wouldn't have invested my time and money into the project.) If not, you can do things the traditional way by paying your educational publisher of choice $15 a bingo card set. If you plan on doing this activity twice, ever, I really do save you money.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.