Just what are you paying for if you cough up £350 for the latest whizz-bang suite of office programs? Well there's pressing a CD-Rom - about 50p in bulk quantities. Plus a slab of highquality printing, by way of a manual - say a tenner. Then there's the large cost of developing the program: tens of thousands of hours of work by programmers, spread over the number of copies sold. There are also things of less direct benefit to you the buyer - a markup for the retailer and distributor of the software, plus marketing, promotion and advertising costs. Shipping, warehousing, and stock control costs - the list goes on and on, and the final price gets higher. Within the suite there may be dozens of features you'll never use - you're paying for those too. Very often, though, there is another way. Alongside the highticket programs on retail sale is the alternative world of shareware. These programs are produced by individuals or small companies rather than corporations. Instead of lengthy licences in microscopic print and dire warnings against copying there is usually a request to copy and distribute the program, provided that people who go on using it beyond an evaluation period pay a fee and register their copy of the program.
Take for example someone who wants to scan pictures and scale, crop and edit them for use in a newsletter or a Web site. The unquestioned king of image-manipulation programs is Adobe's PhotoShop. Used by professionals the world over, PhotoShop offers a huge range of features for its £450 price tag.
But many users will find all the features they need (or can learn how to use) in shareware programs such as LView (registration $48) or PaintShop (registration £48), saving themselves a lot of money and learning in the process.
Generally, however, shareware comes into its own in specialised applications rather than these mainstream ones in which the commercial software companies tend to dominate.
A voice-memo recorder for the Psion pocket computer? Try David Joyce's Memovoc 2. Or a planetarium in your PC? Choose between at least a dozen highquality shareware options. Shareware excels in supplying utilities - the small programs that fill gaps that commercial vendors overlook - and nichemarket programs. In some areas, shareware prevails. Most of the compression utilities used to squeeze more files onto a disk or collect a group of files into one convenient unit are shareware.
Another field in which shareware has provided many of the great programs is games. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom would probably have become classics whichever way they were distributed, but shareware distribution made them accessible quickly to users worldwide. And Netscape's use of the shareware model to distribute its Web brower is now legendary. As operating systems and commercial programs became bigger and more sophisticated they built in many features that had sustained shareware authors. But the opportunities for shareware keep cropping up. Early shareware distribution was mainly by "shareware libraries" - companies which charged a (usually modest) duplicating and delivery fee to post out disks. Some still advertise in the computer magazines, but most have disappeared, overtaken by the huge capacity and low cost of magazine cover-disks and CDRoms (which often include dozens of shareware titles a month). The easiest way to get hold of a wide range of shareware is over the Net. Well-stocked sites can hold hundreds of thousands of programs - and allow visitors to browse them by category or search by keyword for that perfect program that must be out there someplace. Leading shareware Web sites include the following:
www.jumbo.com
www.shareware.com
www.download.com
www.filepile.com
www.ensta.fr/internet
www.shareware95.com
www.sharewarejunkies.com
www.winsite.com