edyshor -
first of all, thank you for a very thoughtfull post.
you are not the first person to say this but you have said it in the most reasonable and thoughtful way of anyway and that is very much appreciated.
as carol says, we have been debating both privately and publically the best way to describe what we are doing. part of the problem is that there is no perfect term for what we are doing.. is it shareware? no. so what is it then? Registerware might be closest term, but i'm not sure many people understand that concept.
i do personally consider our software donationware (and i consider it freeware). because i think our software meets the key principles of those terms. However, I do acknowledge that there is a line and if it becomes too inconvenient for people to use the programs without doing "something" then you begin to abuse the terms.
if you get the chance check out the long article we wrote about some of these ideas:
http://articles.dona...r.com/One/index.htmlthat might explain a little more about what we are trying to do; there is also a long usenet thread which has much more elaborate discussion of this issue:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3651.0what i can tell you is that we take comments like yours very seriously, and we are cogitating on the best way we can improve the communication of what we are doing without giving up our core principles. Maybe we can find a way to make everyone happier with the way we describe our software, either by changing the terms of describing it or changing our policies. Whatever we do, our software will remain free to use.
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