Also if you think about almost an idea you can come up with has been done before in some way, shape, or form. Very hard to come up with a truly unique application given the way its so easy to distribute applications over the internet. Also, for every freeware application there is probably at least two developers selling it...
agree 100%.
also, in the world we live, 90% of the game is marketing. it amazes me how often people are selling software that is clearly inferior to the freeware equivelant, but marketing money lets them dominate the market.
also,
id say that just as often ideas flow from freeware to commercial arena.
take a look at this commercial program (URL Helper) that came out a couple
years after my Url Snooper:
http://www.streaming...ar.com/urlhelper.htmnot only did they directly copy my user interface,
but they actually had the nerve to copy and paste the text from my help file as their home page text]!!!!!!kind of insane. but there is no point in me trying to complain. i just feel bad for people who buy their program.
I might even find an application I like and say "hey I can do that better" or "that looks like it would be fun to code" and then I start.
yep. or often its out of a combined sense of excitement and frustration. you find an app that shows you something good, but is lacking in a way that you really feel needs to be addressed. if authors were more amenable to listening to feature requests i might just wait for the feature to be added, but when it seems like they aren't going to add it, then i might code it myself.
also a word of advice to commercial software authors, and this came up when we did the screencasting tools review. if you price your program out of the range of normal users, you are basically daring the freeware community to come out with a free alternative. this came up also in the discussion of tools for blind users.
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