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The Almighty Buck Operating Systems Software Windows

Freeware for Windows -- Where Did It Go? 308

Posted by Cliff from the missing-in-action dept.
Talahamut asks: "The other day, I was planning on recording a radio show by running my stereo's output into my PC. Oooh, that sucks - WinXP's Sound Recorder limits you to 60 sec. recordings. Oh well, I'll just go online and grab a little WAV recorder. 30 minutes later, I'm frustrated because all I find is crippleware (time-limited, of course...) that records every format under the sun from any sound stream imaginable. What happened to the small home-brewed Windows utilities that used to be so easy to find online years ago? All the freeware sites I checked had nothing but commercial crippleware. Is there no place to find simple programs like that anymore?"
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Freeware for Windows -- Where Did It Go? More

Freeware for Windows -- Where Did It Go?

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  • download.com? (Score:4, Informative)

    by eviljolly ( 411836 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:36AM (#8607740) Journal
    Try going to www.download.com and searching under programs with freeware licenses.

    • Re:download.com? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Grab ( 126025 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @07:49AM (#8608310) Homepage
      Maybe he just needs to "try searching". I know assholes post on boards saying "where do I find XYZ?" instead of checking Google first, but it's really come to a pretty sad state when they get an "Ask Slashdot" instead of searching Google!

      Grab.

      • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Cynikal ( 513328 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:30PM (#8610782) Homepage
        maybe he was using jeeves? [askjeeves.com]

        not everyone has discovered google yet...

        I personally think all search engines should have as the first hit:

        Results:

        1) Seach for this on Google, Dumbass [google.com] Acuracy - 100%

        • Re:download.com? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by dublin ( 31215 )
          maybe he was using jeeves?

          not everyone has discovered google yet...

          FWIW, I'm still a Google fan, but am finding that Teoma (which uses the same engine as Jeeves, but I like Teoma's presentation better) is delivering results where Google fails.

          Google's great (well as good as Infoseek was in its prime before Disney/ABC/Go bought it and ruined it), but Teoma's methods seem to hold up a bit better and retrn results that are often more useful and relevant than Google's, especially in those cases where Googl

    • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rot26 ( 240034 ) * on Friday March 19, 2004 @09:30AM (#8608724) Homepage Journal
      Download.com and similar sites used to be good sources of freeware, but since they started charging to list your software, the freeware is gone; at best, the authors will want to recoup their listing fee.

      • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gi-tux ( 309771 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @10:06AM (#8609046) Homepage
        Along the same lines is the expense of developing on the Windows Platform. If you use actual legal copies of Microsoft's development tools, the cost is somewhat significant. This makes the bar to being able to afford to develop freeware a little higher.

        Also, more and more companies are making it difficult to develop freeware if you are a corporate developer. Many companies now claim that they own everything that you do even on your own time, or at least have very strict rules about using company assests (their development tools) to do personal work.

        These combined together have hurt "free" software on windows. The financial side keeps young programmers from developing "free" software, as they desparately need to recover their costs. The business side keeps many professional programmers from contributing as they don't want to fight the corporate battles to defend what they are doing. I know several folks in both categories. Most of the young folks are moving to Linux where the tools are much less expensive and the professional guys are finding things to do besides computer work on their own time.

        • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by armentage ( 653987 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:01PM (#8610397)
          THe thing about the cost on developing windows is not 100% true. You can download Microsoft's command-line C/C++/C# compilers for free, along with SDK's for developing Internet apps, GUI apps, database apps, and much much more. You have to pay for their IDE, debugger and for a local copy of the manuals, BUT you can do a whole lot for free. Don't forget either that the basic Visual C++/C# package is only $99. There's always GCC/Cygwin. You can install the free MS SDK, and then use any Cygwin development tools you like. Thing is, most windows developers actually LIKE Visual C++. It's really a great environment once you customize it (far less so than you need to customize Emacs).

          • MOD PARENT UP! (Score:5, Funny)

            by tommck ( 69750 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:14PM (#8610583) Homepage
            I'm so sick of uninformed people bashing Microsoft with inaccurate information!

            I mean, really, there are TONS of ways to CORRECTLY bash them! Check your facts!

          • Re:download.com? (Score:4, Informative)

            by Christopher_G_Lewis ( 260977 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @01:01PM (#8611227) Homepage
            Actually, there are a couple of free IDE's for the .Net world.

            Microsoft offers a *FREE* ASP.Net development IDE called ASP.NET Matrix available at www.ASP.Net [asp.net]. It's geared towards code writing, so you don't get a great WYSIWYG HTML tool, but you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.

            For a Windows Form IDE, look at SharpDevelop [icsharpcode.net] which is currently in Beta release .99b :-). It's open source (GPL) so if it doesn't work, you can fix it. I haven't looked at this one in a little while (beta .95), but it looks like the development team is rolling right along, and in fact, I'll probably download a copy of it today for evaluation. I'm a VS user, but actually write *a lot* of C# test code fragments in TextPad [textpad.com].

            I'm sure there are others, but I've actually used those two IDE's (well, three if you count TextPad :-) and would recommend them.

          • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @10:30PM (#8617803)
            The availability of a free-as-in-beer compiler for Windows doesn't have as much of an impact on Windows programmers as you might think. In the free-software world, the good coders tend to work on the Linux kernel and such things. In the Windows world, the good coders tend to want money for their work. Which means that the people left to develop freeware (i.e. free-as-in-beer, not-usually-free-as-in-speech software) are...

            The not-so-good coders. The coders who would just look at you funny if you suggested that they use a command-line tool.

            Sure, there are exceptions, like the excellent IrfanView [irfanview.com] and of course the wonderful (and also free-as-in-speech!) utility CDEX [sourceforge.net], and of course many "cross-platform" projects like Audacity [sourceforge.net] and The GIMP [gimp.org] (many of which originated in the Linux/Unix world anyhow)... buuuut... the majority of the freeware coders in the Windows world tend to be those who couldn't easily make a living off of their code.

            You have to remember that the CULTURE in the Windows world is not like that of the Linux world...

            While we're on the topic of comparative culture (drifting rapidly off-topic here, but...), please note that in Windows-land, money is a much stronger motivator. Additionally, in Windows-land, conformity is a lot more prevalent. You still see Unix coders who prefer some obscure clone of EMACS or vi, or an even more obscure editor no one's heard of, or one they wrote themselves. Windows people tend to write their papers in MS Word, and only MS Word... because that's what everyone else uses. It is a more conformist culture (this isn't a judgment, it's simply a fact!)

            I am, at this very moment, editing a letter using GNU nano and a CGI I scripted in Perl to format it nicely for printing and/or PDFing. I'm not using MS Office, or even OpenOffice. And there are gajillions of people using "weird" or otherwise obscure solutions like that throughout the Unix world. In Windows-land, a weird approach like that would just get you funny looks. Like I said-- differences in culture...

        • Many companies now claim that they own everything that you do even on your own time

          MyCorp has rules like this, but from what I understand, unless your creation is very closely aligned with your workplace functions, what you do on your own time with your own resources would be very difficult for the company to claim if you wanted to challenge it.

          And, most reasonable companies aren't going to go after Joe's MP3 index catalog database management program if he spends his days doing VB to help managers mangl

      • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by egomaniac ( 105476 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:09PM (#8610511) Homepage
        Download.com and similar sites used to be good sources of freeware, but since they started charging to list your software, the freeware is gone; at best, the authors will want to recoup their listing fee.

        The worst part is that they only charge the little guys. My company (big internet company) released a client-side application last year. Download.com approached us and offered to host it for free. They've served a ton of downloads and we've never paid them a cent. They even featured it for a while -- something we neither asked for nor discussed with them.

        Yet the little guy that gets ten downloads a week actually has to pay for it...

        • Re:download.com? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by acroyear ( 5882 ) <jws-slashdot@javaclientcookbook.net> on Monday March 22, 2004 @02:01PM (#8636105) Homepage Journal
          well, a guarenteed download/sale brings in "eyeballs", keeping their advertising rates high. if they can say to the advertisers "look how many people saw our site for ...", they can keep the advertising money flowing to more than cover costs for hosting the popular product.

          the little-guys downloads aren't common enough to warrent raising advertising costs for their specific pages to cover the expense of hosting.

    • Re:download.com? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <peterahoff.gmail@com> on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:55PM (#8611128) Homepage
      Obviously it's been a while since you've tried to find anything on download.com that was both free AND useful. The combination is pretty much non-existant these days.

      As mentioned by others, most of the freeware developers have moved on to Free platforms, BUT a lot of that stuff has been ported to Windows. TheOpenCD [sunsite.dk] has a good listing of Open Source stuff that's been ported. Check the forums if you don't find exactly what you're looking for, as a lot of apps don't get included on the CD for various reasons (space, duplication of functionality, etc).

    • Re:download.com? (Score:3, Informative)

      by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
      Better yet, since download.com isn't that great for FREEWARE (Free or free), why not SF.net, searching for Windows apps?

  • It is linux's fault (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:36AM (#8607743)
    All the freelance programers have gone to linux. Maybe if more programmers spent time creating things for windows, they might find that they like it better than linux.

    • Re:It is linux's fault (Score:5, Insightful)

      by walt-sjc ( 145127 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @08:17AM (#8608390)
      Bwahahahaha! Good one. Here's another. Maybe they will find it more stable and open. Maybe MS programmers will start participating with the community and answering questions on the developers newsgroups. :-)

      But one the serious side, all too many Windows developers get sucked into this idea that they are going to get rich off "shareware." It's just not fun. The developers who are just in it for fun are going to move to a truely open platform where they can share in the work of others in an evironment that fosters those ideals instead of the ideals of greed.

      So anyway, I don't think it's Windows programmers transitioning to Linux, it's just that most Windows programmers are greedy.

      Oh yeah, give this post a half :-)
    • Yet I can still find Windows freeware [freewarehome.com] around sometimes. (It's mostly older stuff.)

  • GNU/* and *BSD (Score:4, Informative)

    by H4x0r Jim Duggan ( 757476 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:36AM (#8607744) Homepage Journal
    I guess most hobbists have moved to GNU/* and *BSD.

    When making free-as-in-cost, they may as well be doing free-as-in-freedom. And working with other developers that share code is nice.

    • Re:GNU/* and *BSD (Score:4, Insightful)

      by H4x0r Jim Duggan ( 757476 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @05:40AM (#8607947) Homepage Journal
      After a bit more thinking, maybe the demand for freeware has dropped due to fear of viruses and an increase in technophobic users. The latter is inevitable and isn't meant in a bad way. The former is a problem that is solved by source code liberation - when software has assistants or gaurdians rather than owners.

      When I need software? in kinda this order:
      $ grep keyword /var/lib/apt/lists/*
      (that's for Debian, but I'm sure there are similar package lists with descriptions on the other distros)

      If that doesn't work, I try the free software directory [gnu.org], and then freshmeat [freshmeat.net].

  • Nonags... (Score:5, Informative)

    by sxyzzx ( 125040 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:37AM (#8607745)
    www.nonags.com

  • Opensource Ate Freeware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:38AM (#8607749)
    A vast majority of the stuff that was once released as freeware is now open source. There are a number of reasons behind this; the ubiquity of the internet and its usefulness in collaboration, the increased availability of high quality development tools and the fact that if you're not making money off some code, you might as well release the source.

    With that in mind, Audacity [sourceforge.net], while being a bit more full featured than a simple sound recorder, will take care of what you need.

    • Re:Opensource Ate Freeware (Score:5, Insightful)

      by enigmatichmachine ( 214829 ) <enigmaticmachine AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday March 19, 2004 @05:24AM (#8607896)
      he's pretty much exactly on the nose there... my freeware search engine is sourceforge now. haven't used things like download.com for years. OH, and audacity rocks! its not soundforge, but its essentially windows sound recorder on a lot of steroids.
    • I'll put my vote behind audacity also.

      I handle the sound for our church, mainly recording sermons and music, and it certainly handles the job. The setup is simple enough to user right out of the *cough* box *cough* or package. Often I by the end of the service I have about 1.5GB of stuff to go through and clean up and put on a CD which audacity handles pretty well also.
    • Yesterday I had some OGG files that I wanted to convert into MP3s to send to an unenlightened friend, and I figured that finding a freeware OGG to WAV decoder program would be a piece of cake. A quick search on google revealed nothing but costly shareware trash. [google.com] It took me way longer then it shoudl have, and OGG is open source!

      • Re:Opensource Ate Freeware (Score:4, Informative)

        by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @03:45PM (#8613404)
        Freeware OGG to WAV decoder?

        I have to assume you're doing this in windows, since under Linux, if you had the ogg libraries you'd already have a decoder and be doing this with a simple shell script.

        So, take just about any decent audio player (such as winamp) that reads Ogg Vorbis and use it to write out WAV files instead of playing to the soundcard (on Winamp it's called the "Nullsoft disk-writer pluging"). Problem solved; you make a playlist, press play & a few seconds later, you're finished.

  • Searching found (Score:5, Informative)

    by Foo2rama ( 755806 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:40AM (#8607756) Homepage Journal
    I use http://www.versiontracker.com to find all my software... I found these gems all freeware for you. Pocket voice recorder [versiontracker.com] Sound recorder [versiontracker.com] And the total search with "shareware" is Hope this helps [versiontracker.com]

  • http://www.pricelessware.org/ (Score:5, Informative)

    by pancakeunicorn ( 710058 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:41AM (#8607757)
    http://www.pricelessware.org/

  • It's called TUCOWS (Score:5, Informative)

    by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:43AM (#8607760) Journal
    Ever heard of TUCOWS? You can search for software there, and order by license.
    AudioGrabber 1.83 [com-us.net] is freeware, and is rated 5 stars. I used to use it to rip CDs, but the description claims it can do exactly what you need.

    • Re:It's called TUCOWS (Score:5, Informative)

      by DeadSea ( 69598 ) * on Friday March 19, 2004 @07:42AM (#8608288) Homepage Journal
      Some more resoureces:
      1. Open Directory: Freeware [dmoz.org] - Lists hundreds of sites offering freeware.
      2. Nonags [nonags.com] - Better that tucows for Windows stuff because it doesn't list nagware.
      • In addition to the sites listed above, don't forget the site even older than TUCOWS, the site that was arguably the first real download site on the net: Simtel. (http://www.simtel.com [simtel.com]

        Simtel is still pretty good, and has always been a good place to find free or cheap software. AFAIK, it was the first large-scale public repository for free and open source software. Before sunsite.unc.edu, before ftp.uu.net, there was Simtel - in the old days, the first place to look for programs or source was ftp.wsmr(f
        • From http://resellers.tucows.com/about/history:

          The origins of what is now Tucows Inc, began in Flint, Michigan in 1993. At that time, while working for local libraries, Scott Swedorski noticed the public's increasing interest in the world wide Web and used his personal website to offer downloadable software. He dubbed this service TUCOWS -- an acronym for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software -- which quickly gained worldwide recognition as the first site to offer software on a "freeware" or "sharewa

  • Audacity (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dave114 ( 168228 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:43AM (#8607761)
    It may be a little bit overkill for recording a radio program (although I've used the software for that before), but why not try the (open source) Audacity [sf.net]?

  • Whats worst..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vertical_98 ( 463483 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:44AM (#8607764) Homepage
    is that I can d/l a program for *Nix that is free (both beer and speech) and find that the exact same prog is shareware or commerical for Win32. VCDEasy and WinAirSnort come to mind.

    It doesn't kill me to pay for software, but I remember the CD's of free games and tools that anyone running DOS could use.
    Vertical
    • Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by the VCDEasy comment? You can still download the freeware version, and it's just a front-end to vcdimager/cdrdao which you can get the GPL'd win32 binaries for.

      You don't by chance know of a good VCDEasy like program for Linux do you? I'd rather not have to write the raw XML to use vcdimager :(.

  • 2 reasons - Spyware and SourceForge.net (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Captain Kirk ( 148843 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:47AM (#8607776) Homepage Journal


    I'll never forget the mess AOL's icq client and Kazaa's browser stuff made of my PC. For most utilities, sourceforge tends to have it. Better still, software from sourceforge doesn't install a ton of spyware, hijack your web browser or do any of the crap that freeware/shareware people are forced to do to pay for hosting.

    This is one area where open source works. To see the benefit, compare DC++ or eMule with their proprietary equivalents. Better quality because no annoying attempt to install stuff other than what is needed.

    Spyware has killed the freeware/shareware world. The degree to which Miranda and eMule are better than their 'free as in beer' equivalents still amazes me.


  • There is no disappearing of the true Dhamma until a fals Dhamma arises in the world.
    When the false Dhamma arises, he makes the true Dhamma to disappear.

    Samyutta-Nikaya II, 224

  • 2 answers in one (Score:5, Informative)

    by samjam ( 256347 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:56AM (#8607809) Homepage Journal
    http://freshmeat.net/projects/audacity/

    Freshmeat.net lists MANY software applications as they are released, and as good search capabilities if you login.

    Audacity is one of the best non-complex sound recorders and mixers going, using wxWidgets works and looks right under linux, windows and probably more (you look).

    Sam
    • Beat me to it. Great tool, especially on OS X, but the Windows version is equally as good. It's won awards and is an example of how the open source community side of the *nix world has spearheaded the development of cross-platform/high quality free software.

      For the original question submitter: follow the advice of a couple of the posts and check sourceforge and freshmeat and stay away from download.com, etc. You'll find a great deal of software for all sorts of tasks.

      And, you might want to consider loadin
      • The only thing with audacity is that It's so damn slow on OSX - it takes me about 5 minutes to save a 10 minuute mp3 file - regardless of how I configure the LAME setup.

        But..... it is way more versatile than any of the 'professional' audio editors I've tried - most of them won't even import mp3 never mind FLAC or OGG.

        It's still getting there....

  • That's how it goes (Score:5, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @05:00AM (#8607824) Homepage Journal
    Years ago my friend who made a freeware called 'GameHack'(sort of, I forgot) was approached by a company for acquiring its source code with good offers. Then the company offers to commercialize his product and pay him royalty after he rejected the first offer. They didn't make the deal in the end.

    I think that's how the things go: you make good freeware and someone will support you to commercialize it if you don't do it yourself. We've seen a couple of such cases in OSS community. Developers are simply human who need to feed their kids and pay their mortage. :)

    P.S. Oh btw, the reason my friend declined their offers is that he lost the source code in a harddrive failure and he's too embarrass to admit it. :)
    • P.S. Oh btw, the reason my friend declined their offers is that he lost the source code in a harddrive failure and he's too embarrass to admit it. :)

      I know that it's too late now, but if the offer was decent enough (too justify the expense) there are a few companies that specialize in data recovery off crashed harddrives.

  • Was there really lots of freeware? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GeckoUK ( 58633 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @05:31AM (#8607917)
    I remember there being lots of shareware that relied on your good will to send money to the creators.

    Perhaps the attitude of the article author that this was all "freeware" is why it has slowly changed to cripple-ware :)

    • Re:Was there really lots of freeware? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @05:42AM (#8607950)
      shareware that relied on your good will to send money to the creators.

      The problem is there wasn't enough good will to buy groceries with. That's why I have seen most shareware titles either become demos or crippleware.

      It's funny also how all the "free downloads" really aren't.
      • Make the software good enough, though, and you might get enough good will. I'm curious to know how much money people send Patrick Kolla, creator of Spybot. Enough for him to keep using the 'donation' model, apparently.

        • Re:Was there really lots of freeware? (Score:5, Informative)

          by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @01:22PM (#8611485) Homepage Journal
          There is a fascinating article about the effectiveness of crippling shareware versus relying on goodwill at http://www.scrawlsoft.com/products/common/hardnose .html [scrawlsoft.com].

          The short summary: He did a study using a Windows shareware program. Upon installation, it randomly chose whether to be crippleware or simply remind the user to pay when starting and quitting the program, with a 50% chance of each. It did this in such a way that reinstalling wouldn't randomly choose again, so most people didn't even realize there were two "versions". The crippled version sold over five times as many copies.

          Granted, this is a single example and may not be representative of all situations, but it's the best study I'm aware of so far. It puts the "people who will buy it will pay for it anyway, don't piss people off by crippling the product" position in serious doubt, at least in my mind.

  • It's not limited to 60 seconds (Score:5, Informative)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @06:01AM (#8607999) Homepage
    It just looks that way because of a bad, bad, bad UI.

    Record 60 seconds of silence. Now save them as a file, and import it into the current sample. Voila! a 2-minute sample, which you can record over. Repeat as necessary.
    • I'd forgotten about that. I was using Windows 95 and finally had the HD space along with a decent sound card to mess with Sound Recorder. I made a five minute long file of silence and saved it as 8-bit, 11KHz. When I wanted to record something longer than one minute I imported the file, improved the quality settings, and recorded over.

    • That's one way (Score:3, Informative)

      by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 )
      Hear is an easier one.

      record any thing

      Press Ctrl+C

      Press and Hold Ctrl+V until it's as long as you like.

  • this is /..... (Score:2, Informative)

    by andrewleung ( 48567 )
    who here hasn't written something like this 3x already?! :-)

    Petzold's book is a good starting point...

  • You probably want... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @07:49AM (#8608308) Homepage
    foobar2000 [foobar2000.org] and foo_record. Can play and record pretty much every audio format imaginable (although you probably want to find the 0.7 diskwriters until they're all ported to the new 0.8 API.. ask me if you need a hand, but you should be able to find stuff on the very useful forum) in 64 bit float precision. It can apply software DSP's, perform tagging operations at a level which puts the likes of Tag & Rename to shame, and is more configurable than any other audio player out there (because it's more than just an audio player ;)

    Most of the components are BSD licensed too. And don't let the default look put you off; it's skinnable [foobarlooks.tk] and you can go a *long* way with nice formatting strings [koillismaa.fi].

    I could go on, but I should really stop gushing. I've successfully converted quite a few peeps by doing this though, so there must be some truth in it :)

  • This is what you want (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ptaff ( 165113 ) * on Friday March 19, 2004 @08:29AM (#8608432) Homepage
    GnuWin [gnuwin.epfl.ch] is a nice burnable collection of free software for Windows.

    I personally always include a "GPL" when I search for Windows software; helps filter out the cripppleware.

  • Google "freeware"... (Score:2, Informative)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )
    and you get:

    http://www.freewarehome.com/
    http://www.nonags.com
    http://www.tucows.com

    and then:

    http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
    http://www.dago.pmp.com.pl/messer/

    /. is not a hand filtered Google. Well, actually, in this case it is, but you see my point... MoJo

  • I experianced the same thing a while ago. Since at this time I was in high school and could not afford to buy every piece of shareware that I need, my only option was to look for cracks/warez. I finally got sick of the moral/legal/painintheass aspects of this method and switched to Linux.

    Now every computer I own runs Debian (I switched my server from Gentoo yesterday), my software is 100% legal and it cost me $0. I believe I have given back to the open source community in the form of the amount of bug repo

  • AnalogX (Score:4, Informative)

    by Reddog0176 ( 587713 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @08:56AM (#8608511) Homepage
    AnalogX.com has some pretty good software. http://www.analogx.com/contents/download.htm

  • As a reminder of how to develop under MFC a couple of days ago I wrote a toy program for monitoring machines.

    Kinda like Nagios does (formerly netsaint) but in a single application instead of a webbased system.

    I sent a copy to a colleague who appreciated it, and one of his first comments was sell it for 29$!

    I am a Debian guy, I write free software for Linux/Unix and I could do for Windows - but to be honest I have no qualms about charging for Windows.

    Why? None of the software I've produced has been by a

  • Having just experienced the same need, I googled for "windows open source wav record" and instantly had pages of free and/or open source offerings for windows.

    The top of the list was http://www.vorbis.com/software.psp, which pointed me towards Audacity, which I had already used under Debian (its nice to see open source projects going cross-platform).

    This was less than 5 minutes. Google gives you exactly what you ask for, after all....

  • A similar phenomenon has happened with drivers. It used to be much easier to track down drivers for discontinued hardware. Now a web-search will turn up deceptive sites that try to sell you access to drivers.

    In this case I think we have to put some of the blame on the search engines. They accept kickbacks from sites to be listed earlier in the list of results.

    Perhaps not being able to find freeware is a similar phenonmenon.

    What we need is an altruistic, non-commercial search engine -- with powerful

  • it's generational (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @09:46AM (#8608860) Homepage
    I'm not convinced that it's as simple as "all the former Windows free(beer)ware developers are now doing Free(speech)ware for Linux." I just don't see a lot of that transition happening. I think it's more of a generational thing.

    The folks who wrote DOS and Windows freeware in the 80's and 90's have just gotten tired of it. It was fun, but the community of techie early adopters has been inundated with everybody and his mother-in-law, and it's just not the same anymore. If they're still doing it, they've decided to make a job of it: hence crippleware requiring payment. Some have moved on to Linux and such, but the rest are just middle-aged parents who don't have time or enthusiasm for it anymore.

    Meanwhile, the new generation of techie types (who could have been early adopters of PCs, but now it's too late for that) have either gone directly into open-source, or they've grown up in that "mature market" of Windows, where it seems that most of the neat toys and applets they'd want are already bundled with the OS, and the bubbling stewpot of innovation has cooled to a simmer.

    Another related factor is that the nature of the computer you take out of the box has changed dramatically over that timeframe. If you bought a computer 25 years ago, it was expected that you would do some programming with it. Turn on that Apple II or C64 or that IBM PC without an OS installed, and you're in a BASIC interpretter. The more recent computer purchaser is never really given that nudge.

  • Free Alternatives (Score:4, Informative)

    by apirkle ( 40268 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @10:26AM (#8609228)
    If you're using Windows, you should probably be using all of these programs (if you need them). Most of them are pretty stable and mature.

    Audacity - Sound editing (so this post is on-topic!)

    Mozilla FireFox - Web browsing.

    The Gimp - graphics/photo editing

    Sodipodi - Vector graphics (SVG) editing. It's no Illustrator, but the basics are there, and they're pretty nice.

    OpenOffice - Not quite ready to replace Word/Excel/PPT, but it's great if you (or your employer/university) haven't already shelled out for Office.

    FileZilla - FTP client

    Gaim - AOL Instant Messenger client

    PuTTY - ssh client

    There's a bit more elaboration and links on my blog [pirkle.org].

  • One possible reason... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Andy Smith ( 55346 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @10:44AM (#8609423)
    I was in a similar situation myself recently. I wanted a program to rip the audio from a stand-up DVD so I could listen to it on the PC without needing to play the DVD.

    After a looong search I eventually found one free program that could do the job. Downloaded it, installed it, started ripping. Five minutes later it stopped. Time-limited, you see. But good news! Apparently there was a commercial version which could record for longer than five minutes! So after being tricked like that, obviously I rushed to order the commercial version... NOT.

    Obviously that was a dirty bait-and-switch trick but I can think of one legitimate reason why more ethical coders may be moving away from free releases...

    A few years ago I wrote a video capture program. It was for my own personal use because I wasn't happy with any of the commercial options available. I decided to release the software for free, and included in the zip file a brief text file explaining how to use it and stating the one very limited, specific job that it was designed to perform.

    The software was listed on one download site and the reviewers there ripped it to shreds.

    Why?

    Because they claimed that a certain feature didn't work.

    Never mind the fact that the info file made no mention of that feature. Never mind the fact that the feature was way outside the scope of this particular program. These reviewers wanted a free video capture program with a certain feature, so when a free video capture program came out *without* that feature, they reviewed the program as defective.

    Would I release a program for free in future?

    Very unlikely.

    If someone considers buying a program then they'll probably read the instructions to make sure it can do what they want. If they go ahead and buy it then they'll almost certainly have read the instructions. But if it's free, as with most free stuff online, people have unrealistic expectations and they react nastily when those expectations aren't met.

  • For something really nice simple and free.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by zhiwenchong ( 155773 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @11:10AM (#8609766)
    Try this
    Stepvoice recorder
    http://www.stepvoice.com [stepvoice.com]

    It records almost any sound source directly into MP3. You can also define quality of the recording.

    Best of all, it's only 230k!

  • Excellent Freeware Site (Score:5, Informative)

    by todsandberg ( 655653 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @11:12AM (#8609795) Homepage
    Excellent Freeware Site
    http://www.snapfiles.com/freeeware/ [snapfiles.com] (used to be webattack.com)
    I used to be addicted to freeware and this was one of my favorite places to get a fix.
    All the software is well categorized.
    I can often find what I'm looking for here.

    http://www.nonags.com is good too.

    Tod

  • Audacity (Score:2, Informative)

    by Space ( 13455 )
    If you are still looking for an audio recording app check out the windows port of Audacity [sourceforge.net]. It has reat sound quality, mp3 and ogg output, Multi track, 32-bit floating point sound files, etc.

  • Try this one (Score:3, Informative)

    by mrdogi ( 82975 ) <<mrdogi> <at> <sbcglobal.net>> on Friday March 19, 2004 @11:48AM (#8610225) Homepage
    ScanRec [davee.com] is one I've found rather useful. It isn't an end-all/be-all recorder, but it does have a rather useful feature. It was created with a VOX control originally to be used for recording ham sessions. So, it would not record constantly, but only when anybody brodcast. It will create a log file detailing what times it did the recordings. Anyway, I've used it for radio/TV stuff in the past, and I've had few problems with it (other than recording in a format that Media Player didn't really like.

  • Its changed, not disappeared (Score:4, Informative)

    by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:48PM (#8611035) Journal
    Probably over half of the programs that I run on my Windows machines are GNU or open source programs (Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GIMP, grep, awk, sed, and even things like Bash). There are very few major GNU/Linux programs that don't run fine under windows these days either because they were written to be portable in the first place or because CYGWIN does a pretty decent job of emulating the unix libraries.

  • Exact Audio Copy (Score:3, Informative)

    by recursiv ( 324497 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:55PM (#8611134) Homepage Journal
    I see someone already mentioned Audacity, but I also wanted to mention that Exact Audio Copy [exactaudiocopy.de] will do exactly what you want, despite primarily being a cd ripping tool.

  • yes virginia, you can you windows sndrec32 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:58PM (#8611184) Homepage Journal
    You can use sndrec32 to convert analog to mp3

    record a blank file, about 2 seconds,
    using 'effects' increase the length by 'decreasing speed' as needed to length required for project.


    start at beginning of file, and hit 'record' this causes your new sound to mix with the file

    using windows sound recorder, it's ability to convert, and the lame codec, I actually have a friend I setup converting his old LAME punk rock from casettes to mp3's using just soundrec.. I actually created blank wav's for him in 180, 240, and 900 second versions, and have used it successfully to record an entire side of a 45 minute casette onto one file, 2800 second blank wav, pared down as needed after the casette was in.

  • I blame VB... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @01:42PM (#8611755) Homepage Journal
    It seems the problem is much older than that. When VB became popular, everyone who could make a dialog box pop up figured he or she could slap together some (usually) crappy piece of semi-functional-ware, charge $29.99 and become rich. It didn't help that shareware had been successful for a lot of products (mostly because the successful products were _good_). Shareware _is_ a great idea, but there is so much stuff out there which is complete crap, and you'll see 10 wastes of disk space for every app that is actually worth the 30 seconds to download.

    My frustration is not so much finding free tools but finding _any_ tools that don't suck for small simple needs like the one described. I'll gladly pay a small fee for a small utility that does something really well, but the freeware actually tends to be better than the shareware in so many cases, probably because the creator is motivated to make a useful app rather than just become the next WinZip (which I happily paid for years ago, but now I use WinRAR, also paid for). Big commercial apps have their place, but most of the time, what I'm looking for is a simple tool to fill a simple need, not something that tries to be everything to everyone.

    Between sourceforge.net and freshmeat.org and maybe a little learning curve with cygwin, there is plenty of good Windows open source software out there to be had, but it should be a lot better.

    Recently I wanted a good font manager for Windows, something that would let me browse through hundreds of fonts and install or uninstall them quickly and easily. I found the same thing... a bunch of crappy shareware (or at best, decent shareware that lacked features I required), so in frustration I started writing my own using old Ziff-Davis free utility source code as a starting point. I haven't gotten far because of work demands, but if I ever get something good, I will release it Open Source.

    And please, Windows programmers, if you are going to release freeware, give us the source. Many marginal piece of software could be very valuable if the source were available.

    I have nothing against shareware or commercial software, but if you are going to go that route, your app better be worth the download, and from what I've seen, most aren't.
    At the end of the day, any good software is hard to find.

  • Those "free" programs you speak of were shareware, and users were on thier honor to pay for them eventually if they continued to use it.

    Maybe they noticed that there wasn't much "honor" out there. Maybe they noticed thier software being used everywhere and how few people were willing to pay the usually dirt cheap registration fee.

    Any-way, what you're looking for is called OSS, and it does exist for windows too.

  • Jet Audio (Score:3, Informative)

    by attaboy ( 689931 ) * on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:32PM (#8613904)
    Did you try Jet Audio Basic?

    See download.com

  • The new freeware (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Friday March 19, 2004 @11:44PM (#8618198) Journal
    There's plenty of open source out there.

    The problem with looking for freeware on freeware/shareware sites is that those sites are desperate for some sort of revenue, so they prefer to host shareware and demos that they can earn revenue from through affiliate links. Having worked for such a site, I ought to know.

    Most of the best freeware is open source nowadays. Whenever it's not it's usually to promote a commercial product. CDEX is one of the best cd rippers, sound recorders, and sound converters all in one.

  • Misdiagnosis? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cookie_cutter ( 533841 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @08:18PM (#8623674)
    Sometimes the trouble isn't that the software (or whatever item your searching for) doesn't exist, but that search engines don't favour them, but rather rank up the search-engine tailored commercial sites instead.

    This is why it is often better to go to a site which serves as a portal to links to your subject of interest, rather than a general search engine.

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