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USB Overdrive is shareware!
Authored by: jeb1138 on Nov 15, '02 02:04:50AM

I think we're actually more in agreement than it appears. I hope I didn't make it sound like I was encouraging people to avoid registration requirements -- actually, I fully support shareware and am a registered user of USB Overdrive. But remember, every shareware product has a different license scheme and different usage restrictions. Shareware is a balance of going after "market share" by getting people to try your programs and actually getting some of those people to pay. In this case the author has taken a pretty liberal stance. I deleted my license file and restarted USB Overdrive to remember exactly what he said. This is it:

"This program is shareware... This annoying request will no longer appear after you register by entering the code below. <b>There is no limitation in this unregistered version of the driver except a shareware reminder that appears at every startup until you register</b>." (sidenote: "startup" refers to starting up the change-your-settings part of the program, if you need to do so.)

So, Alessandro (the author) imposes absolutely no restrictions, neither "on paper" nor through any other means, on using his program unregistered (except the "annoying request", of course). It is 100% legal to do so.

Because Alessandro has taken this open stance I can promote his awesome program in forums like this one and more people will try it out because they know they can legally use it for free for as long as they wish. Out of those people a good number (he hopes) will register when they find out how cool it is (with a little help from the occasional reminder) like me. But for the poor man an pop-up request still equals free, so I say it still qualifies as a 100% free poor-man's solution! :)

I hope that clarifies things a little! And thanks for the complement on the tip.

Shameless plug for Alessandro: his program works wonderfully, he was by far the first to put out an OS X multi-button mouse driver, he's very responsive to e-mails and update-frequency has been very reasonable. Try it out! :)



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