One of my previous papers has leaded me recently to speak (on e-mail) with the author of the software related in my paper. I took the opportunity to tell him that I was really surprised (and very pleased) to find out that his software was available for free on the Internet. I mean, freeware isn't new, but we rarely see it anymore. He told me that he used to try to sell his software for a while but it didn't translate into enough revenue to rely on it for a living (so he got a real job, to quote him). That's too bad because it's really a good piece of software (like many other shareware programs available on the Net). I asked him (naively, I admit) why he didn't put it free for personal use, and charge companies for commercial use? That's what he was doing, he said, but it turned out that most companies didn't bother to pay for the software (even Fortune 100 companies), for a variety of reasons which I won't discuss in this paper. And he's right, I've seen it myself at previous workplaces (but they at least did something about it, never too late to do the good thing). So instead of making a big hassle with big companies to get his honestly earned money, he simply put his software for free.
Around the same time, much noise was done on the net about so-called "spyware", used in some commercial software. This spyware was sending to its homebase server data about user downloading habits. The companies denied that such use was made, but a lot of individuals are skeptic of this. These companies have announced recently that they will remove such "features" from their software, since "it was never used" according to them. But who knows what other softwares out there that could have the same functionality?
With these two events happening around the same time, it mixed in my mind, and I came up with the idea that I present here in this paper. I'd like to know what software authors and privacy advocates (or whoever have a valid opinion about this, i.e. no flames) thinks about what is presented here, and if it could really solve some shareware authors chores.
2. Some shareware models
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