In this gray area, both bundling and fairware have some common black and white pattern in that instead of veering towards the kind hearted gifts that are donations, both models seek to nag the user due to a make shift desire to increase the profits of what morally should be an option and purely an option on the user side.

-Paul Keith (October 17, 2011, 08:01 AM)

I strongly disagree with your use of the words "profit" and "morally" there. Profit is what you get when revenues exceed expenses. Since what fairware tries to do is to break even with invested development hours, I don't think we can say that it's trying to increase profits. Increase revenues, yes. Increase profits, no.

As for morally, so you're suggesting that anything short of pure freeware is morally wrong? Shareware and all, morally wrong? That's quite a strong word to use. If we take your reasoning further, an artist asking for anything else than voluntary contributions for his concerts would also be morally wrong.

hsoft, to be fair to superboy's point, if you have this:

The initial popup simply mentions fairware, but otherwise is a standard shareware "you can try it for free, but until you buy it, there are limitations"

then we may be back on the shareware turf where we have people paying because they have to in order to use the software.

so i'm not sure it's fair to say that this is evidence that people pay even if they they don't feel like they need to.

-mouser (September 29, 2011, 12:34 PM)

The "double license" thing is less than 3 days old. The 2000$ threshold had been reached in september before that new system came along. The problem I was trying to solve with this new dual system is not so much one of income, but one of incomprehension and frustration (but a side effect of it is increased income).

But yes, you're right, it's not quite "pay whatever/whenever you want" anymore, but given what we've said before about "care vs don't care", I think that this system reaches a fair balance.

EDIT: (now that I look at the numbers more closely, the threshold wasn't quite reached, but it would have been, even without the dual thing)

I've released the "dual-licensed" dupeGuru yesterday evening and I think the end results is rather interesting. The initial popup simply mentions fairware, but otherwise is a standard shareware "you can try it for free, but until you buy it, there are limitations". There's a "Fairware?" button for the curious. I even created a specific purchase webpage which, unlike the fairware contribution page, doesn't mention anything about fairware (the goal is to not confuse the user who doesn't want to be confused). The fairware "about" page now mentions that to unlock the fairware mode, all you have to do is to type "fairware" in the registration key dialog. When you do that, dupeGuru behaves as it did before.

Out of 12 contributions since the release, 2 were of "purchase" type. These stats are skewed because only one of the 3 editions has been made "dual-license" yet, and not everyone updated to that latest version. But simply the fact that these 2 "purchases" were made is indication enough, I think, that there is a group of people who just want to know about how much it costs.

Another interesting fact is that both these purchases were from non-english countries, so maybe that their english is simply not good enough to understand the page describing fairware?