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The Do's and Don'ts of Shareware, Part 2
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Shareware vs. Freeware |
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2002-10-09 22:04:21 |
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anonymous2
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Does anyone have any thoughts on where to draw the line between shareware and freeware?
I'm certainly not going to be depending on my rather amateur software-writing skills (I'm just a college student) to pay the rent, but I certainly wouldn't mind the extra cash.
I'm currently writing a simple piece of software so that you can play Monopoly in Mac OS X. It has a nice Cocoa interface and has all the basic features of the game (or will very soon) but there aren't many fancy graphics and the game is fundamentally simple. Should I try making this a shareware app or just give it away?
Is it a good idea to make two different versions of software -- one free and one shareware -- with a somewhat different feature set?
Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Doty
npdoty@amherst.edu
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Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.
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Shareware vs. Freeware
2002-10-27 07:46:50
sanford
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But you did have an interesting point: Does it help to have a freeware version and a shareware version of a given piece of software?
It really depends. It's possible that the freeware version could impact the sales of the shareware version significantly. Furthermore, you'll have to incur the additional complexity of maintaining and testing two different products. Even though they'd have most of their code in common, there's still lots of stuff that could go wrong, creating headaches you may not want. And don't forget that users of freeware sometimes want support too... and that takes time and money for you to provide.
Bottom line: it depends on your product and your market.
-Sanford