GeckoFood's Journal: [query] A Matter of Personal Integrity

I use shareware. I believe in the concept of try-before-you-buy and it has worked out well for me. I buy software I like and I delete what I don't like. I have over a dozen shareware applications that I have paid for, some of which I use every single day and some of them I have not used in several years.

About three years ago I purchased a larger application that does a lot of neat things. It has had several minor updates which are free, and I have been very cool with that. This week, the first major revision was released and with it there is a nominal upgrade fee. According to the author, it is a free upgrade if the old version was purchased within the last 90 days, otherwise the old keys will not work and the fee is required to upgrade. I'm cool with that too, and I downloaded the new version for a test drive to decide if I wanted to upgrade.

Out of curiosity, I plugged in my old registration info for the old version and expected to get back a message about invalid registration details. Instead, it accepted my information and as a result I got a free upgrade even though I was not supposed to.

This has me feeling uncomfortable. Should I contact the author? I have a feeling that if it accepted my old key, it will likely accept everyone else's and he will lose revenue. The fee is only $30, but there is a principle at work here.

If you have to ask

[bethanie]

then you already know the answer.

Re:

[stoolpigeon]

Yep. You already know what to do - but I for one would be happy to provide a little cheering on from the side if it helps. "Go GeckoFood! Way to do the right thing!"

Re:

[Shadow Wrought]

I concur, and have little doubt the e-mails have already winged themselves across the ether;-)

Yes

[johndiii]

The title of the JE answers the question, I think.

Chess Game

[Morosoph]

A number of years ago, I bought a chess game cheaply. It was listed as shareware, and I decided that I wanted to pay the author the proper price for it. The problem was that I simply could not find the author.

I has long lost the game (which ran under windows 3.11), and this episode is of some small sadness to me, not least because of the publishers' cynicism. For them, it was just a cheap game, but they had no intension to fascilitate the author's compensation.