What SHARECLS Really Is
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As you may have guessed by now SHARECLS is a spoof on
the "shareware" market. Don't get me wrong. There are a few
excellent products out marketed with the shareware concept,
PC-Write, Telix, Boyan, Procomm and some others immediately come
to my mind. On the other hand, there are a lot of truly poor
quality programs that perform relatively trivial tasks that the
authors feel they should be paid for. It's these programs that
I'm spoofing.

You know the type of programs and authors I am talking
about. There is always a file that tries to tell you what a
great deal you're getting. The author rambles on about how no
other program does as good a job as his does and how he was
forced to write his after searching desperately for a suitable
commercial product. Then he goes into a long-winded explanation
about how he, once he realized that he had written one of the
finest programs of all time, attempted to sell it as a
commercial product at a high price. Invariably, the author had
no business phone line and the phone number he put in his ads
was his home phone number, which was answered by either his wife
or children, who knew nothing about this program. On those rare
occasions where someone actually wanted to pay for the program,
they were told that they couldn't use a credit card (the author
was going to arrange to accept credit cards after he got rich).
The "ads" were almost always placed in small, local
computer-oriented newsletters or, at best, in a microscopic
classified ad in the back of "Computer Shopper".

At this point in the story, the author cries the blues
about how he was forced out of the market by the major software
companies who used such underhanded techniques as customer
support phone lines, large ads, and arrangements to accept VISA
and MASTERCARD. Now he's desperate. He's cut his price to a
fraction of what it was and is offering it as shareware. If you
send him money, he promises to send you things in return. This
can range from manuals, which are invariably not finished, to
new releases of the program, should he ever write them. In some
cases, he even gives you a disk with your own serial number.
The serial numbered version is very special. If you give it
away, the author, who's is giving a version without a serial
number away and doesn't have the money to take out a real ad in
a magazine, will hire a battery of attorneys and take you to
court. This is an interesting idea since he talks about how the
concept of shareware works on trust.

It is to these authors that I dedicate SHARECLS, and
while I am poking fun at them, I sincerely hope that they learn
from this and are successful in developing and marketing high
quality software in the future.