The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Source: http://www.freewaregenius.com/2011/03/3 ... arch-2011/

more and more tool are switching to freeware
my question is is it good or bad?
One software developers I know for a long time, told me that he also swtiched his tool to freeware. I asked how he make profit to support future development. He told me by adware. He told me most software claiming to be freeware, infact gather user info and send to some data center selling for money.

Is that true?

A lot of freeware bundles toolbars (Ask, Yahoo, Bing, etc) or offers additional software which does that or is payware (OpenCandy, etc) in the installers. Some apps have also used your computing power that is resold to 3rd parties as distributed computing. Some apps may also monitor your browsing usage or other things and report it back for marketing analysis (though I haven't personally used any apps or seen any that do this).

There is a mantra that if you're not the customer (meaning you paid for it), then you are the product being sold. This is true in relation to many 'freeware' apps from commercial entities. It's certainly not all of them, though. I don't even think it would be 'most' of them. But I use far more open source software than freeware personally, so am not as familiar with it as some others here will be.

JohnTHaller wrote:There is a mantra that if you're not the customer (meaning you paid for it), then you are the product being sold.

Good point! (Emphasis mine.)

Spicy Guitar looks like an awesome app!