Best places to submit your freeware?

[tgreaves]

A little off topic but this is the best forum I can think of for my question..

Im designing a stock calculator for Windows using Qt.. Im not charging for it so its freeware(no source).. Where is the best place to upload the program to so that the masses can search and get to it?

I know download.com from cnet is a good place but what are some others?

[wysota]

qt-apps.org is a good place to go and sourceforge.net is probably the biggest repository of freeware applications.

[fullmetalcoder]

Doesn't Sourceforge require Open Source license? And the same apply to Qt-Apps.org AFAIK. I think Qt-Prop.org is the right place for closed-source Qt apps.

[wysota]

Doesn't Sourceforge require Open Source license?

As far as I know, no.

And the same apply to Qt-Apps.org AFAIK.

Yes, this one is correct.

I think Qt-Prop.org is the right place for closed-source Qt apps.

I seem to have misunderstood the word 'freeware' in this context Now the question is why close the sources if the application is free (as in free beer)?

[seneca]

Now the question is why close the sources if the application is free (as in free beer)?

Protect hard earned knowledge?
Avoid getting target of patent trolls?

[wysota]

Protect hard earned knowledge?

You can still do that with OS application while allowing anyone to learn from your code.

Avoid getting target of patent trolls?

Security through obscurity? Or better yet "legality through obscurity"?

The only thing I can think of is if you use a solution that has a licence denying its use in open source applications (regardless of providing or not the source code of the solution itself). But I have never heard of such a thing

[seneca]

Or better yet "legality through obscurity"?

Absolutely. Patents are the biggest treat to open source.

[wysota]

The fact that nobody knows you are breaking a law doesn't mean you are not breaking it. And on the other end, existance of an open-source solution doesn't mean anyone can take it and apply for a patent. "open source" doesn't mean "copyleft" or "public domain". If you release a piece of open source code, you are still its author and are protected by law. You can even patent the code yourself if you want.

[seneca]

No matter if your code really infringes somebodies patent (how could you ever know that without your own professional legal department at all?), when you get sued from a big player you as a small OS developer will most likely be ruined before the case is decided.

Sure you may have chance to win such a case if organizations such as FSF find it in line with theire political agenda - but then your project must be popular enough such as apache, linux, php etc. So most developers should not count on that, and better in first place avoid all the trouble. By not exposing source you dont give the opponent the amunnition to shoot against yourself.

Don't get me wrong, I have released substantial amounts of OS myself, but I understand why people are reluctant to do such these days.

[wysota]

Still, "* through obscurity" is not the way. One can always reverse engineer your code or sue you because of some ridiculous reason or claim, so not revealing your source code will not change things much. I can understand the "I'm afraid someone will steal my code so I want to hide it" case but not "I will not show my code because I can get sued" one.

[seneca]

You could then also say "dont change default passwords because every password can be cracked". Or "publish your credit card numbers on your website, because the waiter in the restaurant has seen it anyway".

Like it or not, but obscuring has its reason in real world.

[wysota]

It's not like that. You can and should protect sensitive information in any possible way, but only the information itself, not the algorithms that operate on it. So in case of your examples the password protection algorithm and credit card money transfer protocol can (and should) be open as they are/should not be a protection mechanism themselves, that's a false feeling of safety. Obscurity is only a good method if it is done temporarily (for instance delaying the information about a possible bug in a system until the bug itself is fixed or a cure is known/distributed).

Furthermore the "openess" of the protocol or algorithm is becoming more and more of an requirement when dealing with really sensitive things, like the military or government. Obscurity hides the information from everybody - not only from the "bad guys" but also from the "good guys" making it harder to verify and/or validate the algorithm/protocol/whatever.

To sum things up, obscuring has only one reason in "real world" - laziness (or greed). Why make a flawless solution when we can make a not-bad one in quarter that time and hide all the flaws it has? Maybe nobody will notice and we can get away with it...

[AlphaWolf]

Someone has to stop these fucking software patents

[ComaWhite]

There is a petition to stop it in Europe

[NatLWalker]

Patents aren't all bad. I do not think any developer should be able to freely leach off of the innovation of market leaders. I think that's wrong. Think harder if you want a better product, IMO.

And there's nothing wrong with releasing freeware as closed source. People have been doing it since the 80s. I don't know how anyone can post/speak as if it's something they've never heard of. Get with the program. Most people aren't suprised by this cause I'm sure about 80% of us have used Freeware Closed Source appliations more than enough (depends? Process Monitor? MagicDisc? and thousands of others).

Why doesn't Microsoft just release the Visual Studio 2008 source code (and the 2010 too), since there are "freeware" Express Editions.

/facepalm

I think, especially IRT software development, European companies are not great in establishing top positioning in their respective markets/domains. I can see why they'd like to get rid of patents.

[fullmetalcoder]

Patenting software makes as much sense as patenting equations would IMO.

Can you imagine what the world would look like if mathematicians/physicians like Gauss, Einstein, Lagrange, Helmholtz, Newton, Leibniz, Cantor, Maxwell, Fubini, Ampere, Laplace, Fourier, Stokes ... (the list is so long that it would probably overflow the software limit of the forum ) had patented their works and sued anyone trying to build upon it?

I can, and quite honestly I would not enjoy living in such a world, not only for ethical concerns but also because all the technology that as become a pillar of our society (think computers, cellphones, satellites, radio, cars, planes, ...) would simply NOT exist.

[NatLWalker]

Patenting software makes as much sense as patenting equations would IMO.

Can you imagine what the world would look like if mathematicians/physicians like Gauss, Einstein, Lagrange, Helmholtz, Newton, Leibniz, Cantor, Maxwell, Fubini, Ampere, Laplace, Fourier, Stokes ... (the list is so long that it would probably overflow the software limit of the forum ) had patented their works and sued anyone trying to build upon it?

I can, and quite honestly I would not enjoy living in such a world, not only for ethical concerns but also because all the technology that as become a pillar of our society (think computers, cellphones, satellites, radio, cars, planes, ...) would simply NOT exist.

How you can equate things like IntelliSense and Edit-and-Continue to the Quadratic Formula and Theory of Relativity is beyond my comprehension.

But these things are usually more religious than logical, IMO.

OpenSource developers are too keen on borrowing innovations, instead of creating their own. Sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel and innovate more than you imitate.

This is why I value projects like KDE more than ReactOS. Way to reinvent the wheel 100% for something you get for ~50 bucks with a new computer, and moves at the speed of light IRT APIs and Frameworks.

[ComaWhite]

What is the point of patenting a feature in a programming language? Especially if it is closed source. Durrrr stupid companies. Because there is no way to release the source. I even looked at the patents in America. Seen a patent for the detach/release crap like Microsoft has of COM. It's retarded. For like TV's, computers etc. Yeah patents for that I agree for source code patenting is retarded

[fullmetalcoder]

How you can equate things like IntelliSense and Edit-and-Continue to the Quadratic Formula and Theory of Relativity is beyond my comprehension.

My point was that patenting concepts is a bit of a joke. I can understand the rationale behind patenting devices (something physical) but I cannot see any valid reason to patent the theory behind. For instance I would agree that patenting a processus to create a tyre and the machinery involved makes (some) sense (though the investment needed to actually take advantage of that knowledge is a much higher barrier than a patent in such a case) whereas patenting the concept of a tyre and the laws used to describe it (in mechanical and/or chemical terms) would be downright insane IMO.

By the way I was more thinking about things like differential/integral calculus, Fourier Transform, electromagnetic waves (by far the most widely used data transmission vector nowadays), and such...

Anyway your examples are quite interesting because anyone can come up with the concepts and a fair amount of people are able to implement them on their own. As an example some Edyuk users consider that the code completion I wrote bests IntelliSense while I had never even heard of IntelliSense before they mentioned it, and my code is far from perfect which basically means that the amount of money and the number of experimented developers involved in a project does not directly correlate to the quality of the final product. Now what's the link with patenting? Well, big companies can afford to patent things and sue people afterwards whereas individuals can't. As a consequence even if a talented individual write a piece of code that outperforms any existing equivalent he can still be crushed by the patents violation claims of a company who would righteously protect its "innovation".

A typical example of the nasty effect of patents that I saw on a forum : someone wrote a research paper on physical simulation and mentioned it may be patented. All serious forum users, most of which were working in a field that related more or less directly to physics simulation, avoided reading that thread to make sure none of their works could ever be considered as derivatives of that research paper. Now can you pretend that this encourages innovation?

OpenSource developers are too keen on borrowing innovations, instead of creating their own

I think this sentence would be a lot nearer to truth I you just replaced OpenSource with Microsoft but I might be biased.