Freeware at what cost. Part 2

You may know my stance on freeware. I'm not generally in favour of it because it degrades the intrinsic value of the programmers art. Freeware can have many purposes though. There is the purpose of pride in having created a great solution to a problem coupled with the altruistic notion that one doesn't need remuneration for  some work. There is the purpose of camaraderie, wishing to provide something interesting to like-minded people and there is the purpose of commercial exploitation when a freeware is in fact generating something that might be even more valuable than money, such as for example, trust.

The last time I offered any freeware it was in the early 1990s. I became incredibly impressed with the game Myst by Robyn and Rand Miller. It was everything I wanted in a game. Rich, challenging, enthralling and with a visual impact that brought fantasy landscapes to life, albeit in 256 colours, in a way that enabled the dullard graphics of the day to make the experience as immersive as it could be. Myst inspired me to write a wireframe scene editor that output 3D images via the Polyray and Persistence Of Vision ray-tracers that were also freeware at the time. My editor, called WinModeller was a C++ editor for shapes that had some nice features and that I wanted to use to make educational content along the lines of Myst. In the end, I got a job working for someone else and nothing came of it. Eventually, someone bought the code from me for 25,000 dollars but then didn't do anything with it because times seemed to have moved on I suppose.

Today I am offering some freeware again. I have my android apps which are on Play under the name of BPApps and I will probably create more for iPhone and Windows Phone platforms. I had not intended to choose a free model for these packages and had originally decided to make them freemium with a small payment to unlock full functionality but, really, looking at the market place and the software already available I didn't feel that I could truly justify even a meager demand for money. I may go to an ad-based monetization of later applications but these ones, which I really wrote for my own use, can be shared with like minded people and will, I hope, engender trust in my brand. Of course I wouln't be churlish enough to flatly refuse a donation or two for the code but that's at the discretion of the user. The app works well for me so I'm cool with that.

Interestingly however I do have a different angle. In developing the code for Android machines I've come up with a way of making that code very much easier for porting to other platforms. I hinted at this in March of this year when I spoke at the Software Passion conference about creating multi-platform applications. I have a nice method for doing this now and I will be releasing some tools later that I hope will generate a little revenue.

So, is free really free? Who can say. As I get older I tend to think not. Does not-free imply paying money? Nope, definitely not. Facebook is free but the currency of Facebook is in the data generated by it's users and the spinoff sales of stuff other than the Facebook social app itself.