Thursday, July 17, 2008

What you think about Software Industry

There are mainly two types of businesses in the software industry; those developing proprietary software such as Microsoft, and those developing open source software. Developing proprietary software is costly and involves software licensing and the need to protect the software from cracking and piracy.

The main financial return on open source comes from selling services, such as training and support, rather than the software itself. Many contributors to open source software (especially those developing software tools) also feel that there is a significant long-term return in the form of improved resources and capabilities within the software industry. Now there are mainly fours types of software working like:

Freeware

Freeware is copyrighted computer software which is made available for use free of charge, for an unlimited time, as opposed to shareware where the user is required to pay (e.g. after some trial period or for additional functionality). Authors of freeware often want to "give something to the community", but also want credit for their software and to retain control of its future development. Sometimes when programmers decide to stop developing a freeware product, they will give the source code to another programmer or release the product's source code to the public as free software.

Shareware

Shareware is a marketing method for computer software. Shareware software is typically obtained free of charge, either by downloading from the Internet or on magazine cover-disks. A user tries out the program, and thus shareware has also been known as "try before you buy". A shareware program is accompanied by a request for payment, and the software's distribution license often requires such a payment.

Open source

Open source describes the principles and methodologies to promote open access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with either relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create user-generated software content through either incremental individual effort, or collaboration.

Commercial

Commercial software is computer software sold for commercial purposes or that serves commercial purposes. Commercial software is most often proprietary software, but free software is also used as commercial software. All or parts of software packages and services that support commerce are increasingly made available as free software, including products from Red Hat, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, and Google.

Software Development

Reference: Answers.com

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great post,

I really loved your content. Thanks a tonne for sharing this useful information and hope to read more from you.

One of the first benefits of freeware, educational software, and teaching scripts online is that they are so convenient. If you are a homeschool parent, you know how limited your time is. Between creating lesson plans, teaching those lessons, field trips, experiments, chores, and work, it is often difficult to run to the bookstore or the library in order to retrieve information that will supplement the educational topics that your little ones are covering. However, with freeware, you can find what you need, when you need it most. I have even been lucky enough to stumble upon some websites that are nothing but freeware software programs. I am pretty sure that this is called a “freeware directory” or maybe a “software directory” but these websites are tops!

Software Directory