Ask HN: Is shareware dead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837353

by zippy786 • 11 years ago

60 56 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Are there any HN users who make $$ from a shareware ? Any full timers doing this ?

Among the problems is that "the channel" has squeezed out shareware.

The channel is the path from developer to end-user. At one time, one had to purchase hookers and blow for the distributors. In some respects the app stores are helpful but I regard them as eliminating our ability to determine our own destinies.

halviti• 11 years ago

Shareware is not dead, but I would say the term 'shareware' is.

These days it's just software. You have free software that gives you a limited user experience or timed trial to decide if you want to buy the full thing.

Look at any app store and look at the free rankings. It's practically full of nothing but "lite" versions that only exist to give you some features to help you decide whether you want to pay for the full version.

If anything 'shareware' is more alive than ever although it goes by different names these days, 'lite', 'freemium', etc.

Lrigikithumer• 11 years ago

This might be true for the mobile market, however the PC market is a different beast entirely.

the8472• 11 years ago

On the PC you still get 30-day trials for professional software or apply-for-private-use-licence-leave-an-email models.

It's not quite the same as the eternal winzip install on millions of PCs, but some people still make money that way.

benihana• 11 years ago

I don't think I've seen someone type the word shareware in about 3 or 4 years. I don't think I've heard someone say shareware in at least fifteen years.

But I think you're absolutely right: the spirit is there, it just goes by a different name.

eloisant2• 11 years ago

The idea behind the word "shareware" is that you "shared" the demo version with your friends, and anyone who wants to buy a licence can.

So now that we get everything from a direct download, it makes sense that the term "shareware" is no longer used. The concept of having the demo spreading organically as people share it is gone.

auganov• 11 years ago

Isn't invite-only software a similar concept?

MPSimmons• 11 years ago

I dunno. I mean, I tell everybody who will listen to me about CamScanner, a free app that scans documents to PDFs on your phone (android and ios). It saves me tons of time, and I share it with people - granted, they download it on their phone, but it's almost the same thing.

I guess if you look at the social construct, it's similar, but in terms of distribution, bittorrent is probably the closest...but not as similar in terms of license ;-)

digi_owl• 11 years ago

Dunno, plenty of stuff that still depend on word of mouth even if it is sitting in an app store somewhere.

Plenty of stuff i'm using on Android i found via people mentioning it on various forums etc.

z3t42• 11 years ago

Right, thinking about it, it could still work with very popular things like TV series. You release the whole season with bit-torrent to save bandwidth and marketing costs. Then after watching the first two episodes you have to pay for the rest. Sure there's no tech for that today, but hey startup idea!

cschmidt• 11 years ago

You could argue that something like Sublime Text is Shareware, even though they don't use the term. You can download it, and the trial period never expires. So you use it without paying if you are a lame person, much like in the shareware days.

coldtea• 11 years ago

The idea behind the word "shareware" is that you "shared" the demo version with your friends, and anyone who wants to buy a licence can.

Not many people did that even at the time. Most people got their shareware from magazine disks, BBS, early internet shareware sites (TuCows, VersionTracker, CNET downloads, etc), and even the mail. So it's not like "sharing between friends" was essential to the market (the name "shareware" was a coincidental result of a magazine contest asking readers to find a generic name for this type of software).

And, as you say, it doesn't make much sense now either, because we have the internet. If someone wants, he can just send a link to a friend to download it himself (or 10 other ways of "recommendations").

davexunit• 11 years ago

You have free software that gives you a limited user experience or timed trial to decide if you want to buy the full thing.

"Free software" is already a well defined term, and it does not mean this.

https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

icebraining• 11 years ago

As much as I like the GNU philosophy, Free [as in price=0] Software is perfectly valid as well.

astrodust• 11 years ago

Yelling at clouds doesn't make them go away. The word "free" meaning "no cost" has been around a lot longer than GNU has.

Re-defining what "free" means is an uphill battle, and not everyone agrees with this effort.

dspillett• 11 years ago

I depends what you mean by shareware too.

There were many who only considered software to be shareware if it was fully featured and non-expiring whether you paid or not, operating on an honour system. Search for "Association of Shareware Professionals" who were a group actively evangelising this approach. Anything else was referred to by them as demoware (or sometimes as the overly negative (IMO) term "crippleware"). Most of what you see in app stores would not fit this definition because features are missing or limited in the free versions. "Nagware" was usually "permitted" under the definition, if the request for license/donation wasn't obtrusive (i.e. no messages boxes that blocked operation and couldn't be closed until a timeout has passed).

There are some current examples that probably qualify for the above description. SublimeText is the only one that springs immediately to mind but I'm sure there are others of significance I'm forgetting.

Apps that are ad-sponsored but otherwise complete until you pay might be a grey area. Back when this discussion was happening "in my earshot" this part of the modern market simply didn't exist (at least not in anything like its current form).

r3m6• 11 years ago

The shareware concept is doing well, just the name has changed to "30-day trial" or "Lite" or "Free/Pro" or....

As an example, Andy Brice blogs about his shareware business at http://successfulsoftware.net/

andersthue• 11 years ago

I agree that the term shareware is dead, but time limited or feature limited freeware with a paid full version is not dead.

I make a living from http://www.watermark-image.com and other sw for windows, I have et a lot of people at MicroConf who makes a living from sw.

_pmf_• 11 years ago

Shareware has been renamed to "Apps".

patio11• 11 years ago

The word is pretty decisively dead [+]. Lots of companies make money by selling software over the Internet on a free trial model. As was routinely observed in the shareware community as we tired of the name, "How can we differentiate 'shareware' from the rest of the industry when Microsoft Freaking Office is sold on a free trial model these days?" After the widespread rise of the web "You can give the installer executable to other people. Please do!" was no longer a really compelling advantage, and it always confused a lot of civilians. ("You mean I don't have to pay for it, right?" "No, that is not what shareware means." "You greedy bastard!")

I just sold my business which did this back in April -- it supported me above my previous day job salary for a while back in the day, before the rest of my business eclipsed it. I was, ahem, very much not the most successful HNer with the model, but many of the others like to keep things under their hat.

At least one received a check written on purple paper with an exclamation point on it, as if the dollar amount wasn't an exclamation enough. (He's occasionally active on HN and can tell you the story if he wants to, but it isn't mine to tell.)

[+] I used to be a card-carrying member of the Association of Shareware Professionals, which is now the Association of Software Professionals, because the membership expressed its opinion that the shareware branding communicated "crappy software which will give your Googles a virus but is otherwise free."

czardoz• 11 years ago

Could "freemium software" be considered to be the new "shareware software"? With both types, you get some features without paying, and you must pay for the full experience.

pdpi• 11 years ago

There's at least one piece of modern software I use on a daily basis that should count as shareware: Sublime Text.

HappyTypist• 11 years ago

Sure, but does it describe itself as shareware? The original benefit of shareware was that you could redistribute the installer to your friends. This is no longer a compelling benefit, and 'shareware' has serious negative implications nowadays. The term is dead.

vinceyuan• 11 years ago

Shareware becomes free apps with in-app purchases.

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

There's no "shareware" per se, but there's plenty of "indie trialware" if you will and it's doing really well.

I have long-time friends who live very comfortably from a small herd of shareware products. I also know others who decided to grow at some point and now operate moderately-sized software shops that too are doing well. All of these are on Windows, and nearly all of them are desktop software. One thing to keep in mind that smaller companies tend to put up a larger corporate facades, so the chances are that you've seen plenty of single-man shareware shops without realizing it.

pjmlp• 11 years ago

Yes, open source killed it.

CRidge• 11 years ago

As a word it looks pretty dead: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=shareware

Morendil• 11 years ago

tfinniga• 11 years ago

The n-gram viewer goes back further, but only comes up to 2008. It looks like the usage started in the mid 80s, peaked around 95, and was almost dead in 2008.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=shareware&year...

azifali• 11 years ago

Freemium is the new shareware

scottmcdot• 11 years ago

When you dissect the word "shareware", "share" has an entirely different meaning now.

What did "share" actually mean then?

eloisant2• 11 years ago

You could "share" the demo/lite version with your friends, unlike boxed software where any copy was prohibited.

bontoJR• 11 years ago

It was very common to find that kind of software on magazines' CDs. For example, I installed for the first time WinRar after finding it inside a promo-CD of a magazine (I don't remember the name). I guess the 'share' was because the license was(is) permissive in terms of distribution (internet mirrors, magazines' CDs, promo floppies, etc...) and after a certain amount of time, it was required to pay the license to keep using the software.

cm2187• 11 years ago

It probably related to the practice of sharing useful tools on CDs. Before the internet the highlight of my month was the CD ROM that came with computer magazines and was loaded with sharewares and freewares.

pigeons• 11 years ago

Floppies not CDs

kstrauser• 11 years ago

It meant that you'd download it from one BBS, then upload it to the next for those sweet file sharing credits. That was my standard method for getting software until 1994 or so.

segmondy• 11 years ago

Yes, Shareware is dead. The entire idea with shareware was that you could share the software with others. The distribution channel was sharing. But the shared software was limited, and those who like what they received could call and upgrade.

bane• 11 years ago

Shareware as a business model is alive and well. It's likely that most commercial software a user uses these days started as a demo they were testing, maybe with a few features missing, or nag screens or a timer -- then they upgraded it to a full licensed copy. For whatever reason, we stopped calling it shareware, but that's basically the model in use for closed-source commercial consumer-level software.

In many ways, shareware has become the "default" method for distributing commercial software, and it's non-shareware software that's kind of weird. This even happens on the high end. I worked for a desktop software company years ago, and we gave away our software on a 30-day trial, if they liked it, a seat cost $30k. It was called the "30-till-30" model by our sales guys who didn't realize it was just shareware.

Looking at my own list of software I have installed right now:

Chrome - free with open source version

Firefox - open source + donationware

Thunderbird - open source + donationware

MS-Office - shareware

Foobar - open source + donationware

yed - free, but with commercial tools as part of the ecosystem, this makes it in my mind pseudo-shareware

Gimp - open source + donationware

Simcity 4 - fully commercial

Notepad++ - open source + donationware

Sublime Text 2 - shareware

FileZilla - open source + donationware

Mirc - shareware

Anki - similar model to yed, desktop version is free, mobile is paid

Bulk Rename Utility - donationware, closed source

Caustic - similar model to yed, desktop version if free, mobile is paid

Pycharm - shareware

renoise - shareware

bunch of steamgames - most started as a demo, so I'll go with shareware

skipping over python, perl and the usual open source suspects

and on my phone: most started as a "lite" version so many of the apps are all shareware

xenophonf• 11 years ago

Lot's of people make money from shareware, if you mean "software with a free trial or evaluation period". In the age of halfway decent worldwide network connectivity and third-party download sites that bundle adware/spyware, the idea of letting other people distribute one's software for you is probably dead.

If it didn't have all the historical baggage from the BBS days, I think that "shareware" would be the perfect replacement for FSF's somewhat awkward "libre software" or the more ambiguous "free software". Heck, most people already treat free trials as something they can download, install, run forever, give to their buddies, distribute over the corporate LAN, etc.---WinZIP being the canonical example. The word "share" really gets to the heart of what FSF's "software freedom" is about, which is modification and re-distribution by end users.

ctdonath2• 11 years ago

"Shareware" is an old term. Archaic labels don't sell well.

Now it's called "in-app purchases": get the core app for free, get bonus/improvement material for a fee.

trequartista• 11 years ago

I'd say shareware still exists, except now such apps ask you to tweet about the app or post on Facebook or pin it on Pinterest.

There are plenty of apps which allow additional functionality or unlock more levels if you tweet or post about them.

ctdonath2• 11 years ago

Insofar as the term "shareware" can be construed as users actively giving away copies, with references to where paid expansion/sequel software can be obtained, that's pretty much over with as the Internet has made distribution trivial (just provide a link, no need to give someone the whole thing) - to the point that one assumes that unless otherwise inaccessible (say, JFK Reloaded isn't available from the publisher any more), better to go download the latest directly from the source rather than a months-old version passed around.

Can't say a definitive "no" to the lead questions, as the world is a big place and there are "underground" groups maintaining limited distribution. On the whole, I'd be surprised to find any.

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

The word "shareware" really comes from a pre-internet era, where distribution of software was a challenge.

So the idea is to let your users do the distribution for you, please, you are free to share this software with your friends by letting them have a copy. Or by putting it on a dialup BBS download area. Or by including it on a CD you try to sell people of thousands of mostly crappy shareware/freeware ('freeware' another word that's sort of been eclipsed by the 'open source' revolution), which people are still happy to pay $5 or $10 for, because it was hard to get software otherwise, people didn't have access to an internet with all the software!

Shareware often had all software features unlocked immediately, but encouraged people to pay if they liked it and continued using it. Or maybe not 'encouraged', often "required" by terms of the license, but with no real enforcement mechanism, really just the honor system

Or occasionally locked some features until you had bought a license -- but that was rare in the pre-internet era, because there wasn't a good cheap way to exchange money for license keys, that didn't require building up an expensive infrastructure.

All of these business models are still in use. For instance, you can download SublimeText for free, and use it as long as you want -- buying a SublimeText license does nothing but disable the popup message on startup that says "Please buy a license if you find this useful." I forget the language it uses, how strongly it tries to tell you that you _must_ buy a license to continue using it, but either way it'll let you keep using it forever with the startup popup message, without paying. It's essentially "shareware" as far as that goes -- but there's no need for users to obtain a copy by their friends who already have a copy 'sharing' one; everyone can just download a copy from the ST website themselves.

Some things that basically use this 'business model' are actually open source -- you legally _can_ use the software for whatever you want without paying for it, but if you'd like to support the developers, send money. That's sort of "shareware" too.

But now that it's pretty easy/cheap to set up your own website for people to download software, and sell license keys over the website, and have the software be feature or time-crippled without the license key -- people who really want to require the users to pay in order to keep using the software are more likely to do that. And we don't call it "shareware", it doesn't need a special name, because it's such a common way to do it now, maybe even the predominant way to do it.

The term 'shareware' is from a pre-internet era, and from an era before open source caught on too (and open source catching on came along with the internet era too). And there's no reason to buy a CD of a compilation of mostly crappy freeware/shareware anymore, everyone can just browse the internet and download whatever they like.

andymitchell• 11 years ago

We make an downloadable product [1] that over its lifetime has been sold as donationware, freemium and trial-based -- three of the main variants that shareware evolved into.

Short answer: downloadable trial software is still viable... we're doubling revenue each year and supporting a team of 6.

Donationware (product is free for life, occasionally nagged for money). Lesson's learned: 1) It's no way to live, but a good way to start, as the userbase was at it's most vocal with feedback back then, when we were trying to hit product/market fit (perhaps because 'donation ware' felt much more community-spirited). 2) I don't have exact conversion numbers, but I do remember being surprised by how much an individual donated ($1 was the minimum, $30 the average, $300 the max). I've read studies since that if someone is asked to name their own price, they'll be much more generous (the downside being not as many people will pay anything at all).

We then tried freemium (features were restricted until people paid). Lesson's learnt: 1) Do freemium by resource constraints, not feature constraints (i.e. all features are available, but when you use X amount of data you have to pay). Because otherwise users just see a 'broken' product, and don't see the point in paying for something less-useful. 2) We also noticed that most people quit in the first two weeks, and almost everyone who didn't, paid. I.e. the 'free plan' was hardly used (related to the first point). Thus it was just a maintenance burden.

Now we have a two week trial, and then you pay. Lesson's learnt: 1) Benchmarked against freemium, conversion increased 4% in real terms (and 20% in relative terms). Mostly because it nudged the small % of 'free plan' folks from above into buying.

[1] www.activeinboxhq.com

kazinator• 11 years ago

Nobody today can offer a proprietary, binary-only program as a "trial demo", and call it "sharing" with a straight face.

Not when you can get an entire operating system loaded with packages that are all freely redistributable, open source.

It's still done, just not called "shareware".

Ah yes, now I remember; there used to be an etiquette behind using the term "shareware". Some people believed that the term "shareware" should only be applied to non-expiring, freely redistributable programs. Only thing is, those programs came only in binary form. Some forbade reverse engineering (like unlocking some increased functionality). It's still really not sharing; it's just dumping a free product on the market. Without bending that that etiquette too much, you could call Internet Explorer shareware.

T-hawk• 11 years ago

Shareware conflated two different concepts that are now separated: the distribution model, and the pricing model.

The distribution model was the genius of shareware at the time. In the days before the Internet and websites, physical distribution of the bits was a significant challenge. Shareware got the users doing the distribution work for the creator. Take this free version and copy and share it as much as you like. This succeeded very well, of course. But it's just outmoded now when anyone can toss up a website to host anything.

The pricing model is alive and well, we now call it freemium. Offering a limited free version, with a paid upgrade for full features, has been successful all along and transitioned fine from the days of shareware to Internet-hosted distribution. Or the product was full-featured all along and just asked you to register on the honor system. That still exists too and we now call it donationware.

So the "share" part of shareware has been superseded, but there are still elements of it in the modern software industry.

ben1040• 11 years ago

The distribution model was the genius of shareware at the time. In the days before the Internet and websites, physical distribution of the bits was a significant challenge. Shareware got the users doing the distribution work for the creator. Take this free version and copy and share it as much as you like.

That concept seemed to make better sense if you had people who were just handing disks around to friends. At that point the share part was clearer.

What was always really annoying though was back in the late 80s/early 90s there were companies that basically existed just to duplicate floppies with shareware on them and sell them in stores.

I remember going to a computer store and seeing a couple racks of floppies with games or home software for $10 or so. If you weren't familiar with the shareware concept you'd assume you got a great deal -- only to take it home and discover you paid money for a disk with a single piece of shareware on it, not a full license to the software.

At least later on when companies started selling CD-ROM compilations with 600MB worth of shareware, it was more clear you were buying something to save you the trouble of downloading all that from a BBS, not buying a single piece of software.

Ask HN: Is shareware dead?

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