Careware

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Careware (also called charityware, helpware, or goodware) is software licensed in a way that benefits a charity. Some careware is distributed free, and the author suggests that some payment be made to either a nominated charity, or a charity of the user's choice. Commercial careware, on the other hand, includes a levy for charity on top of the distribution charge. [1] Careware can also involve a barter of some kind, or even a pledge to be kind to strangers.

Contents

Overview

The term "charityware" was credited to Canadian developer Roedy Green in a 1988 issue of 2600 Magazine. [2] One of the first known uses of the term "careware" appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal in Al Stevens' C Programming Column in about 1991. Stevens was developing a user interface library and publishing the source code in monthly installments. To distribute code to readers, Stevens suggested they send him an addressed stamped mailer with a blank diskette. He copied the code onto the diskette and returned it. He also suggested that to express their appreciation they include a dollar, which he would donate to the local food bank in Brevard County, Florida. Stevens named this distribution method "careware." [3]

Paul Lutus's [4] careware idea involves no monetary exchange - instead it involves a request for the user to "stop complaining for a while and make the world a better place." [5]

For example, the vim text editor is free software but includes a request from its author, Bram Moolenaar, that users donate to ICCF Holland for work to help AIDS victims in Uganda. Vim's Charityware license has been declared by Richard Stallman to be GPL-compatible. [6] Another current example is MJ's CD Archiver, a file archiver for Microsoft Windows/Linux/Mac OS X. The suggested charity is NACEF, a US-registered charity for China's Project Hope.

A close variation of careware is donationware, which has a narrower definition than careware.

Examples

Non-commercial examples

Commercial examples

Related Research Articles

Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website or on a compact disc included with a magazine. Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vim (text editor)</span> Improved version of the Vi keyboard-oriented text editor

Vim is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface.

vi Keyboard-oriented text editor

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Bram Moolenaar was a Dutch software engineer and activist who was the creator, maintainer, and benevolent dictator for life of Vim, a vi-derivative text editor. He advocated for ICCF Holland, a non-governmental organization supporting AIDS victims in Uganda, and used the popularity of Vim to encourage donations.

International Child Care Fund Holland is a small non-governmental organization that supports a project in Kibaale, a small town in the south of Uganda. The project aims at helping AIDS victims. In this poor area of Africa, many adults are infected with HIV. When they die, the children are left behind. At the project they receive the support they need. Education is provided at the school. A clinic provides the only affordable medical help in the area.

wxWidgets Widget toolkit

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Live CD</span> Complete, bootable computer installation that runs directly from a CD-ROM

A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.

A patch is a set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, with such patches usually being called bugfixes or bug fixes. Patches are often written to improve the functionality, usability, or performance of a program. The majority of patches are provided by software vendors for operating system and application updates.

Donationware is a licensing model that supplies fully operational unrestricted software to the user and requests an optional donation be paid to the programmer or a third-party beneficiary. The amount of the donation may also be stipulated by the author, or it may be left to the discretion of the user, based on individual perceptions of the software's value. Since donationware comes fully operational when payment is optional, it is a type of freeware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arachnophilia</span> HTML editor

Arachnophilia is a source code editor written in Java by Paul Lutus. It is the successor to another HTML editor, WebThing. The name Arachnophilia comes from the term meaning "love of spiders", a metaphor for the task of building on the World Wide Web.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux</span> Family of Unix-like operating systems

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyleft</span> Practice of mandating free use in all derivatives of a work

Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, scientific discoveries and even certain patents.

Proprietary software is software that, according to the free and open-source software community, grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.

The bundling of Microsoft Windows is the installation of Microsoft Windows in computers before their purchase. Microsoft encourages original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of personal computers to include Windows licenses with their products, and agreements between Microsoft and OEMs have undergone antitrust scrutiny. Users opposed to the bundling of Microsoft Windows, including Linux users, have sought refunds for Windows licenses, arguing that the Windows end-user license agreement entitles them to return unused Windows licenses for a cash refund. Although some customers have successfully obtained payments, others have been less successful.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Game-Maker</span> MS-DOS-based suite of game design tools

Game-Maker is an MS-DOS-based suite of game design tools, accompanied by demonstration games, produced between 1991 and 1995 by the Amherst, New Hampshire based Recreational Software Designs and sold through direct mail in the US by KD Software. Game-Maker also was sold under various names by licensed distributors in the UK, Korea, and other territories including Captain GameMaker and Create Your Own Games With GameMaker!. Game-Maker is notable as one of the first complete game design packages for DOS-based PCs, for its fully mouse-driven graphical interface, and for its early support for VGA graphics, Sound Blaster sound, and full-screen four-way scrolling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual Studio Code</span> Source code editor developed by Microsoft

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Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.

References

  1. "What is a charityware?". charityware.info. Archived from the original on 21 August 2009. Retrieved 11 January 2010.
  2. Greenberg, Ross (1988). "A Solution to Viruses". 2600 Magazine. 5 (2): 4–7, 28–38. Retrieved 21 April 2022.
  3. Stevens, Al (1 August 1991). "C Programming". Dr. Dobb's Journal. Retrieved 11 January 2010.
  4. "Paul Lutus". 2013-02-15. Retrieved 2013-02-16.
  5. "The CareWare Idea". 18 October 1998. Retrieved 11 January 2010. Date information retrieved from included metadata of Microsoft Word 7 version of the article.
  6. "VIM license".