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From: Ghenis.pasa@Xerox.COM
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Profiteering from Shareware/Freeware?
Message-ID: <1659@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 25-Jun-86 14:43:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.1659
Posted: Wed Jun 25 14:43:09 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 30-Jun-86 05:12:58 EDT
Sender: news@brl-smoke.ARPA
Lines: 29

> I bring the community's attention to the advertisement in the lower
left-hand
> corner of page 372 of the June issue of "PC World" magazine, in which
a
> company calling itself Soft/Plus Research (operating out of a P.O. box
in 
> California) is selling (?) for $6 *each* such popular
shareware/freeware as
> PC-Write, PC-File III, QModem, PC-Calc, DeskMates, and various and
sundry PC


As long as there is no misrepresentation and they only claim to be
charging $6 for media, the copying service and shipping then this seems
like a legitimate thing to do. Six dollars is in line with what you
would pay a non-profit user group for this service. My personal feeling
is that people should really order from user groups such as PC-SIG
because then they help support the user community through these true
service organizations.

By the way, it takes a long time to download one 360k floppy full of
programs even with a 1200 baud modem, so some people would gladly pay $6
to save themselves the hassle. And, believe it or not, there are still
some microcomputer owners who don't have a modem (???!!!).

If there weren't a demand for this service nobody would bother supplying
it...

Pablo Ghenis