Freeware: A Thanksgiving Tradition: First Cut

Summary

I decided that Thanksgiving would be a good time to revisit, annually, the question of what freeware I was using, and what an appropriate contribution would be. I was continuing to develop my customized Start Menu as a repository of links to all of the websites, installed programs, and portables that I used. So a search of the Start Menu, plus a list of Firefox add-ons, seemed to give me a substantial if not complete list of freeware programs for which some contribution might be appropriate. I developed that list in a spreadsheet.  At least for the time being, I excluded some programs (e.g., those that I had used previously but wasn't using anymore; those provided by corporations like Google and Microsoft), so as to focus on the ones that seemed most currently entitled to compensation.  I decided on appropriate values for each program, and also decided to do writeups or reviews.  There were a number of them, so I set up my computer to reopen the spreadsheet weekly as a reminder.  I hoped to be caught up by the next Thanksgiving.

Discussion

My computer, like many, was running a variety of free and paid-for programs.  The motives behind the free programs seemed to vary.  Some programmers evidently hoped their creations would become famous, at which point they could begin selling the software rather than giving it away.  Some supported their work via advertisements.  Some wanted to help others; some just shared a tool that they had invented to address their own needs.


Whether the inventor asked for payment or not, it seemed only fair to pay them something for their work.  There were, however, some problems with that thought.  One was that paying them would cost money.  Most of us, at one time or another, have been tempted not to pay even when we could easily afford it.  In a less piggish vein, there was also the reality that many of us could not afford to pay a fair price for all of the many free tools that a computer system might be running.  We might instead be inclined not to use them, with inferior results for everyone concerned.

A related problem was that it was not clear how much to pay.  Few freeware writers seemed guilty of asking too much.  To the contrary, even the developers of incredibly useful programs tended to ask far less than their programs were worth.  Maybe they were humble, or were underselling themselves; maybe they didn't want to appear too demanding or ridiculous.  For whatever reason, it appeared that freeware compensation provided on an honor-system basis would preferably draw upon an estimation of each program's comparative value, regardless of what the programmer proposed to charge for it.

There was another side to that question of how much to pay.  If I wanted to use Microsoft PowerPoint, I would have to buy a copy.  Depending on Microsoft's internal decisions, I might be able to buy PowerPoint by itself, or I might have to buy a copy of the entire Office suite.  This would be true regardless of whether I wound up using PowerPoint all day, every day, or actually only had a one-time need for it.  In the for-profit market, this issue tended to be worked out on the macro level -- Microsoft's profits depended on charging at a balanced price across a large number of potential purchasers -- but not on the individual level.  That is, I would pay the same price as someone whose usage was very different from mine.  But in the honor-system freeware world, I could choose whatever payment plan made the most sense.  I could buy it outright, or set aside money on a per-use basis, or pay an annual license-like fee, or adopt some other basis, as I chose.

Over the past several years, I had written up a couple of blog posts on the question of how to calculate how much I had used various pieces of freeware.  There didn't yet seem to be a widely used system that would help me in this.  I had eventually decided that maybe this would be something to deal with once a year, during the Christmas holiday season, but that didn't work out.  That season tended to be busy, and it also wasn't usually overflowing with spare cash.  So then I came to the idea of pinning this inquiry to Thanksgiving instead.  As I thought about it, that actually seemed like a better connection.  Freeware was a gift, to be sure; but it was a gift to be thankful for.  And if I made it an annual thing, it could boil down to a couple of relatively simple questions:  how thankful am I, based on my past year's usage, and how do I express that?  The answer to the latter question could range from gratitude to cash payment, depending on the situation; I would have to work that out.

For starters, I decided that it would be OK to do this calculation just once a year.  Yes, there would be programs that I had used during the year but had then discarded, and I might forget or unintentionally minimize their importance to me as of Thanksgiving.  But I didn't think that would be a major problem, and I also felt it would be unwise to try to do it more frequently.  An annual tradition could become something to be proud of; but an expectation that I would do this every month could convert the whole thing into a chore.

The next step, I thought, would be to figure out what I was using.  In my case, there seemed to be two principal locations for freeware:  Firefox add-ons and my Start Menu.  The Firefox part was easy enough:  I could just go into Firefox Tools > Add-ons for a list of the extensions and themes in use.  Alternately, as someone advised, I could type "about:support" in the Firefox address bar to get a printable report.  The Start Menu was also easy enough to see:  I could just go to the Windows 7 Start button and write down all of the programs visible there.  My Start Menu was an especially concentrated location for the programs that I would use because I had customized it to include not only links to installed programs but also the complete program folders for portables.  I also had a project underway to convert my Firefox bookmarks to links in the Start Menu (for websites that I considered tools, such as Softpedia) or to items for my Reference list (for informational sites like Wikipedia).  So it seemed that Firefox and the Start Menu would pretty much capture the list of programs I was using. 

I decided to create the list in an Excel spreadsheet.  (I was using Excel 2003.)  I had columns for the name of the program, the version, and the serial number, if any.  I got a good start on this by copying and pasting the results of that Firefox about:support list.  But I had tons of stuff in my Start Menu.  I didn't want to copy all that information manually.  It seemed advisable to automate the process, if possible.

Next, I extracted relevant information from my customized Start Menu.  This could be done manually.  The following comments describe my attempts to automate that process somewhat.  I began by using Windows Explorer to visit the folder where my Start Menu was located.  I had moved my customized Start Menu to a drive other than drive C, so as to share it across my network and to back it up along with my other data; but as far as I could recall, the way to find the Start Menu folder in a more virgin version of Windows 7 would have been to right-click on the Start button and choose Open Windows Explorer.  Once I had the top level of the Start Menu, I went to the address bar in Windows Explorer and selected and copied its path.  Then I opened a command window (Start > Run > cmd) and typed two commands.  First, C: (or whatever the drive letter was, for where the Start Menu was located), and then "cd " followed by the pathname that I had just copied from Windows Explorer.  (To paste into a command window, I had to right-click on its top bar and then choose Edit > Paste.)  Since this pathname had spaces in it, I began and ended it with quotation marks.  Example:  cd "C:\Folder\Start Menu" and then Enter.  Now I ran a few commands.  Of course, I could save these in a batch file to simplify things in the future.  The commands were as follows:

dir *.lnk /s /b > "D:\Folder Name\SMProgs.txt"
dir *.exe /s /b >> "D:\Folder Name\SMProgs.txt"

These commands would fill SMProgs.txt with directory entries for every shortcut and executable file in my Start Menu folder.  Since the second command was almost identical to the first, the fast way to enter it was just to press the up-arrow and then use the left arrow to go back and add a second ">" symbol and change LNK to EXE.  (I chose the /s and /b options for the DIR command based on information obtained by typing "dir /?" and I was able to view the full printout of resulting information by highlighting the cmd window and pressing WinKey-LeftArrow to make the cmd window tall.)  These two commands created a file called SMProgs.txt.  I opened that file and copied and pasted its contents into an empty Excel spreadsheet.  I did search-and-replace operations to remove the .exe and .lnk extensions, and then ran a formula down an adjacent column to automatically detect exact duplicates.  (That is, sort by the column to be tested, and then use a formula like "If A1 = A2, put an X here, otherwise put nothing."  Of course, the results produced by such commands would then change if I sorted the Xs together, unless I first used an Edit-Copy, Edit-Paste Special-Values combo to convert the formulas into values.)  After deleting exact duplicates, I used a reverse-text function with FIND and MID commands to extract the filename and folder into separate columns.  I now realized that the preceding duplicate-detection step was probably unnecessary, as I now sorted on the filename column and deleted duplicates again.  So, for example, I now had only one entry for a file called Microsoft Excel.  But I still had more than 1,500 rows in the spreadsheet.  Further sorting, editing, and filtering gave me a list of about 450 actually installed programs.

The automated steps had helped somewhat.  I hoped the process would become faster if I did it again in subsequent years.  But from this point forward, it was a manual process.  Using that list of 450, I added spreadsheet columns to mark purchase dates for programs I had already purchased, to exclude those that I did not intend to pay for (e.g., free Microsoft utilities), and to indicate those that I had actually used, as distinct from those that I might have tried but didn't remember, or had installed because I thought I might need them someday.  In the resulting list of about 150 programs, I looked at the list of about a dozen that I had used but would probably not use anymore.  I barely remembered some of these programs, but a few had been really useful in Windows XP.

At this point, I had to decide what I owed.  I felt there was probably not much of an obligation to the people who had written programs that I had only used on a trial basis, though at least I could write reviews for the benefit of others who might use those programs, if I remembered enough to say something helpful.  So I started with that thought.  My reviews could be on sites like Softpedia or CNET (or Newegg or Amazon, for purchased programs), or perhaps a discussion here in a blog post would be appropriate.  I probably would not bother doing a writeup if there were already many reviews, especially since these programs were increasingly outmoded.  It occurred to me that it might also be helpful if I wrote reviews of purchased programs.  I decided to treat the question of hardware reviews separately.  So now I went back down my list of 150 programs I had used and, in a new spreadsheet column, marked those for which I had enough experience at least to write a brief comment or review.  The result was roughly 50-50:  I could say something about half of the programs, and not about the other half.  I looked at the latter and, not surprisingly, found that I felt no particular obligation to pay anything either.  These programs were generally on their way into my life, or out of my life, but had not yet been and might never be useful to me, aside from possibly a brief exploration at some point.  No doubt the list would change somewhat by the time another Thanksgiving rolled around; I planned to revisit them again next year.

So I focused on the 75 or 80 programs that I had used enough to write something about.  There was a question of what to write, and where to write it.  I had reviewed some commercial programs on various websites (e.g., Amazon, CNET), and had also written about my use of some programs in posts on this blog.  While any serious writeup would be better than no writeup, I preferred writing posts on my own blog, for several reasons.  One was that, here, if I added links to other sites, they would not be removed.  I could also describe a process, and the program's performance in it, in much greater detail than would be acceptable in a typically brief review on someone else's website.  Of course, I also appreciated the opportunity to build up my own site while I was discussing someone else's product.  There was the additional concern that writing on a website that might have more visitors (e.g., Amazon) could help to make it more appealing than another that I might actually consider better (e.g., Newegg).  In the past, I had sometimes posted reviews across a number of commercial and sharing websites (including e.g., TigerDirect, Major Geeks).  This could have the drawback of confusing potential users who might think that such websites were sharing reviews among themselves, seeing that they would encounter exactly the same review on multiple sites.  It could also appear that I was propagandizing.  And it could be time-consuming for me to post reviews on six to ten websites, when they requested not only a review but various stars, statements of pros and cons, bottom-line summaries, and so forth.  I decided, as I had decided previously, that the best approach, where possible, was to do a writeup on my own blog that would provide detail and information beyond what would be allowed on a commercial site, so that I could find it, link to it, and expand on it in the future.

Going down the list again, in another spreadsheet column, I marked off those programs that I had already reviewed or discussed in some detail (e.g., IrfanView) and those for which there did not seem to be much need for a review because they were already well known and I was not using them in any noteworthy way (e.g., Skype).  That cut the list in half again, down to about 40 programs that I hadn't yet reviewed and felt I probably should, for the benefit of the programmers and/or of the users.  I added a line to my WEEKLY.BAT file to open this spreadsheet, as a reminder to write something about one of these programs each week.  There would be weeks when I didn't do it, but I hoped that, come next Thanksgiving, I would have substantially reduced this particular obligation.

With the topic of reviews out of the way for the moment, I had to face the matter of money.  The first problem I tackled, in this area, was to decide which programs called for payment.  Among programs that I had used in the past but no longer used, some had been worth paying for.  I wasn't sure how to recall or reconstruct which programs those might be.  I decided to defer that question for the time being, so as to keep this project manageable, and focused strictly on those programs that I expected to continue to use, that I had not yet paid for, and that were of a type for which payment could reasonably be expected.  I excluded those for which I did not yet know enough to write much of a review, on the theory that, in those cases, I was still in something like a shareware trial period.  That is, it seemed unlikely that I would have bought these programs for which I did not have much present use.  Filtering the spreadsheet for these criteria yielded a list of about 50 programs.

Now, given this list of programs for which I should pay something, how much should I pay?  One answer would have been that I should buy the Pro version -- should upgrade from the freeware version, that is -- for those programs that offered that option.  Before reaching that conclusion, though, I decided that payment should ideally be on a sliding scale.  If I were rich, I would want to buy the company or support the individual that had done such good work, in hopes that they would do more of the same.  If I were well-off but not truly rich, I might think that I should pay five or ten times the asking price for the professional version, or maybe buy and distribute five or ten pro licenses, so as to make up for some others who had not yet gotten around to paying, or who couldn't afford it.  If I had only enough money to take care of myself but not enough to cover others, the answer might be to just buy the pro version, with one caveat:  I probably should pay more if the programmer priced it too low.  It vaguely seemed to me that the pro versions of programs I had bought in the past year or two had tended to be around $40, so I tentatively decided that my target payment + contribution for a pro version of a significant program should be in that range, if I could afford it.  In my experience, less significant shareware programs tended to cost around $10-20.  In the commercial market, of course, major programs could cost $100 or more.

Where money was tight, there would be an option of trying to pay or contribute a few dollars per program, so as to cover all programs at the same time, or instead singling out a few for more generous reimbursement.  This question was already decided, in the case of those programs where I needed the pro version and therefore just had to pay what they asked.  But for these ~50 programs, it was up to me.  I decided to start at the low end, with a target of $5 for relatively trivial and $10 or $15 for more significant Firefox add-ons -- for the ones, that is, that saved me money and/or time -- and I assigned these values to those programs in a Target Price column in my spreadsheet.  That accounted for a total of 19 rows in the spreadsheet and a value of $155.  Among the remaining programs, I decided that, on the other end of the spectrum, Firefox had been, for me, an incredibly valuable and complex program easily worth $100 to me, even though it humbly suggested contributions of $5 to $30 -- and that I would probably have had to pay $100 or more to get it, if its major competitors (i.e., Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer) weren't supported by mammoth corporations that apparently saw the browser as a way to control access to the Internet for profit.  Given that view, I probably wouldn't have paid more than around $20 for Opera, which I used only occasionally.  With thoughts like these, I proceeded to ascribe target values to each of the other ~50 programs on my list -- the question being, again, not what would be the lowest price I could get it for but, rather, what was it worth more realistically, considering such factors as my own need and encouraging software development.  Most of the other programs on my list wound up in the $10, $15, and $20 categories.  I would have to adjust those values if further investigation revealed that there were pro versions I didn't know about, at whatever price they might be selling.  I had also kind of rushed through my estimate rather than focusing on each program.  But for purposes of rough estimation, taking account of everything from Firefox to its add-ons, I estimated a value of $750 for these ~50 programs, for an average of about $15 each.

I wasn't in a position to spend $750 on software right then.  I also didn't want to donate $20 to some program and then find out, later, that they had come out with a pro version or had gone to a for-profit model and were now going to charge me another $30.  I decided that this question of payment would be best completed item by item, as I revisited the spreadsheet on a weekly basis -- so that, hopefully, I would be caught up by the next Thanksgiving.  For now, I decided to start by paying for a few programs and add-ons that I had been using for years and for which I was most appreciative.  As I began to focus on those programs, I realized that this drawn-out, weekly approach would probably counteract a bit of stinginess that had set in as I was rushing through my valuation of those programs -- that, in other words, I would probably tend to bump the prices up closer to an average of $20 as I proceeded.  And so it seemed I was set for the coming year's worth of weekly returns to the spreadsheet, with writeups and contributions as circumstances warranted.