Yes. Unless you were a student or faculty member
I was for much of the time, but moving along...
you were supposed to evaluted the Netscape shareware and send payment if you continued to use it.
Perhaps I was supposed to once I graduated, but...
Where exactly was I supposed to send the check? Where was even the occasional reminder screen that Netscape wasn't free, and that maybe this would be a good time to send in payment? And, and this is probably the biggest one, how long was the evaluation period???
I'll answer that last one: for individual users, it never ended.
Shareware may be fine for independent programmers, and, with enough teeth it can even support a fledgling company. But a corporation that was once valued at six billion? No.
And if it's shareware without an enforcement clause, much less a mechanism, well, then I just have to conclude that Microsoft didn't knock down that house of cards someone else would have.
And it's not as if it's too late, even now. All Netscape has to do is come up with a browser product sufficiently superior to IE that it becomes worth paying for.
And if that isn't possible (and Netscape ought to know, one would think), then I guess browsers are a commodity after all. Since one can make as many copies of a browser as one wants to, we thus have essentially an infinite supply for a finite demand, making $0.00 pretty much a fair price for the commodity.
And IMHO, Netscape really only has itself to blame for initiating the perception that browsers were free in the first place. |
