Charles Angelich wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

CA>> Older shareware didn't try to reconfigure your entire setup and 
CA>> would just _execute_ rather than nag you to death first. It was a 
CA>> different time and much more enjoyable for me as well. 

RJT> I guess another way of putting it was that it wasn't as _arrogant_ 
RJT> as it got to be later on... 

CA> It does feel as though shareware authors have become arrogant, yes.
CA> I've always found Windows programmers to be 'snotty' and overly
CA> confident but that's just my opinion. They think they are not. 

CA> The friendliest group were the OS/2 programmers but I never had 
CA> OS/2 to use any of their software on. I have no idea what was 
CA> different for them but they seldom had an attitude about 
CA> themselves.

There was one exception to that which comes to mind.  A file manager (of
all things) that I was trying out stopped at one point when I hit a key to
try something,  and the screen "dissolved" into a shower of
currency,  followed by a brief nag,  after which the program exited.  I'd
been running it a whole 20 minutes or so by that time.  So I restarted it, 
and less than 5 minutes after that,  it did it again,  in response to me
hitting the "help" key!  I got so aggravated at this that I
removed it from the setup,  without bothering to do anything with their
uninstall software (which I didn't trust) and then went on to remove it
from the files section of the bbs.  I wasn't going to support this.  Too
bad I didn't make a note of what the program was,  exactly...

CA> Originally half of the code out there was considered public domain 
CA> and no one tried to horde it or control it. The other half you had 
CA> to ask for and sometimes get a "no" for an answer. I liked it the 
CA> way it was myself.

Yeah.  CP/M was part of when it was fun,  and even in those cases where the
author retained copyright the source code was often included in packages so
that you could understand what was going on.  Some of that stuff was
surprisingly capable for such a small code footprint.

CA> I can say the discussions were far more interesting and much more 
CA> detailed than has been the case the past decade (since GNU and 
CA> GPL).

Oh,  I don't know -- open source is back again,  and that works well for
me. 

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