Friday, February 16, 2007

Shareware, Freeware, et al.

Someone I know had been having some lengthy debates about the whole taxonomy of software types as they evolved, primarily through the BBS world, to the current day. Yes, exciting stuff I know--although, actually, of some historic interest at least. In any case, given that I was pretty involved in that world through my Directory Freedom program and other software, I agreed to answer some questions on the topic. It's all a bit muddy and fuzzy--in part because most people didn't even think about licenses and terminology as carefully as many do today.

Be that as it may, the document is here. I'm licensing it under Creative Commons-Attribution license so that others can re-use some of these definitions if they find them useful.

[Update: Oops, I had a bad link up. Fixed now.]

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