The idea behind the word "shareware" is that you "shared" the demo version with your friends, and anyone who wants to buy a licence can.
So now that we get everything from a direct download, it makes sense that the term "shareware" is no longer used. The concept of having the demo spreading organically as people share it is gone.
You could argue that something like Sublime Text is Shareware, even though they don't use the term. You can download it, and the trial period never expires. So you use it without paying if you are a lame person, much like in the shareware days.
Agree, this seems to be a modern interpretation of this. Charles (http://charlesproxy.com) does this pretty successfully. They let you use the full app, but only run for a 30 minute block.
>The idea behind the word "shareware" is that you "shared" the demo version with your friends, and anyone who wants to buy a licence can.
Not many people did that even at the time. Most people got their shareware from magazine disks, BBS, early internet shareware sites (TuCows, VersionTracker, CNET downloads, etc), and even the mail. So it's not like "sharing between friends" was essential to the market (the name "shareware" was a coincidental result of a magazine contest asking readers to find a generic name for this type of software).
And, as you say, it doesn't make much sense now either, because we have the internet. If someone wants, he can just send a link to a friend to download it himself (or 10 other ways of "recommendations").
Right, thinking about it, it could still work with very popular things like TV series. You release the whole season with bit-torrent to save bandwidth and marketing costs. Then after watching the first two episodes you have to pay for the rest. Sure there's no tech for that today, but hey startup idea!
Isn't this kind of what they're doing on Google Play, or what was done with Mr. Robot, minus the torrent? The first episode or two are free, then you either pay per episode or watch via TV subscription. I frequently download free pilot episodes to see if there are any shows I might be interested in watching. I would say that Mr. Robot was a great example of this. I heard about the show by word of mouth (it might have been here, or possibly on Reddit). I do not watch any other shows on USA, so it is likely that I would have never heard of the show had I not had the pilot recommended to me and easily available to watch on YouTube. I think that last part is key. I probably would not have made the effort to download a "USA" app, or jump through hoops to watch it on a web browser. Having it easily available on my phone where I could watch it with the built in YouTube app was perfect.
My idea is that you share the whole season with "friends" on torrent and other file-sharing sites. Not only the free episodes. You download the entire season! This takes care of both distribution and most of the marketing. You of-course release it with the highest quality! And you do not need any infrastructure whatsoever to do this.
As in the spirit of shareware, you let people watch some of the episodes for free, then charge for the rest. And that's the part some smart people has to figure out.
An idea is to have the content encoded differently depending on the Internet routes. And some type of block-chain that would give you a key to decode the data, depending on a voucher code you insert to the chain.
There absolutely exists tech to do this now. Someone with access to google to knock together a prototype today.
The issue is trust and control. The rights holders (not always the same people as the content creators) don't trust the consumer and want to retain control.
I dunno. I mean, I tell everybody who will listen to me about CamScanner, a free app that scans documents to PDFs on your phone (android and ios). It saves me tons of time, and I share it with people - granted, they download it on their phone, but it's almost the same thing.
I guess if you look at the social construct, it's similar, but in terms of distribution, bittorrent is probably the closest...but not as similar in terms of license ;-)
So now that we get everything from a direct download, it makes sense that the term "shareware" is no longer used. The concept of having the demo spreading organically as people share it is gone.