Shareware Survey

[ED ZOTTI]

Bob, you're a twisted genius . I suppose the key-fake idea would
have occurred to me eventually, but the truth is if I like a program
enough to use it regularly I feel a moral obligation to pay for it.
  I too find crippled programs annoying. The little tricks we've just
been talking about, however, are appended to otherwise fully functional
programs and my main reaction is a chuckle. I remember another stunt
that there wasn't an obvious workaround for, although there's probably
some solution. It was a high memory manager I downloaded from
CompuServe called HRAM. It loaded through CONFIG.SYS like so:
device=hramdev.sys
device=hram.sys himemsls.sys /hmamin=48
There was nothing special in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Anyway, on boot the system
would say something like "Loading HRAM. Press return to continue."
Nothing outrageous, but the sort of little thing that would drive you
nuts if you're like most compubuffs and you want everything automated.
You can't use key-fake programs in a config file, can you? I had the
idea they were different from batch files, somehow, Perhaps you can
enlighten.
  In any case I can't get too worked up about the wickedness of
shareware authors. In my experience they are wonderful people who are
extremely responsive to suggestions from users. I made some suggestions
for a directory management program (DIRECTOR, available on CompuServe's
IBMSYS); the poor guy who wrote it went nuts trying to incorporate
them. (I beta tested maybe a half dozen "rough drafts.") How these guys
make any money I dunno, but I don't begrudge them the $30 or $40 most
of them ask for.
.