When Downloading What Is The Difference Between Shareware, Freeware Etc?
Published by javagee February 1st, 2010 in freewareWhen downloading what is the difference between Shareware, Freeware, Commercial Demo,. Commercial Trial, Open Source etc.
When is it free and when is it a program that will expire, and how do I know it will not add some other program that are attached to the software?
Without getting too involved.
Shareware, demos and trials normally require you to purchase the product after a period of time or it will not work.
Freeware and Open Source are normally a free program that you can run forever at no cost.
Regularly a program provider, not necessarily the program maker will add other programs to the one you download. Most of these are basically safe (Ask toolbar, yahoo toolbar, etc) but sometimes they will be malware and should be avoided. A good virus detector will help but if you download for unsafe places like porn sites or P2P you will get infected. If you download for known sites, you should be fairly safe.
Freeware is free regardless of how long you use. Some examples are like AVG Free version and Ad-Aware. They are free, but some have the basic components compared to paid version that has more features.
Shareware, Commercial Demo, Trial are all the same. They are trials of the full paid program with full features for a certain amount of time. Some trials and demos have limited components and are also timed before they cannot be used.
Open Source is totally different from those terms. Open Source is the coding of the program that is opened freely for anyone to see and even edit (I think… on the editing part)
Freeware and Open source are the only types that is completely free to use without any limitations. If you download make sure you do it from a reliable source such as download.com (for freeware, shareware etc.) and from sourceforge.net (for open source applications).
Shareware is basically a trial.
Freeware is free
Commerical Demo and commercial trial are the same as shareware.
Open source is free
Trials have different expiry dates but are usually 30 days.