Summaries of Portablefreeware.com

I spend so much time trying to write clear, short summaries of other people's work, I was sort of startled to see a pretty good one about our work:

Huge, regularly updated collection of portable freeware or open source applications of all kinds. No specific launcher is distributed by this site, just the applications. (source)

Not bad.

MakeUseOf adds a bit with:

TPFC is the place to go if you're looking for the largest source of portable applications.

Another review from back in 2008 criticized our entries as out of date, but I think Checker and billon have largely resolved this as I frequently have seen them beat other sites to updates.

Only downside is considerable update lag – it often takes up to week for information on new versions to appear there. (source)

Answering freeware critics

Some time back, a user posted something on the site about being angry about how a given freeware program wasn't doing what he wanted.  This having been a trend over time, what follows is my response that I elected not to post.

Certainly there's real concerns about a program that doesn't work, doesn't work properly, or is just a demo.  That's a topic for another time.  Here we're talking about what are to my mind perfectly good programs that mysteriously get crapped on.

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So I'm getting really frustrated with this whole "looking a gift horse in the mouth" attitude.

First, for whatever reasons, there's a long tradition in freeware of people looking at programs and only finding fault.  They don't like the free thing (often something that came with the source code) because the developer did or didn't include something that a minority of his or her users care about.

Second, I often see freeware get compared unfavorably to software that has adware or bundleware competitions.  Programs that -- by virtue of these additional elements -- have an ongoing revenue flow to help pay for their development, improvement, and support.

Third, very few projects see any donations and many tools highlighted on the site are non-simple to create and maintain.  Even those programs with 100,000+ downloads.  I've been struggling to find ways to support developers effectively, whether feature bounties, Amazon Wishlists, or other methods.

I would definitely understand this response if 1. you had seen a roadmap for this program 2. based on this roadmap (including a specific change) you decided to fund the project 3. the developer reneged on this agreement and 4. you stopped funding the project.  If you paid for something and didn't get what you paid for, that would be a very legit response.   Otherwise I really don't understand this response or it's frequency.

Someone once said you get what you pay for and therefore freeware must be junk, but there is such a thing as charity and giving something away because you want to.

The ugly code problem

More than once I've spoken to a developer who's worked on a project for some time and decided to set it aside.  When I ask them to open the code so that it might be utilized by others, a frequent reason they refuse is because "it's ugly".

Well here's one possible reply: post it anyway and present it as what not to do.

Ongoing drama with free software / open source

I'm extremely frustrated by this situation that seems to come up over and over again: a really amazing open source project starts to take off and then the developer gets frustrated/annoyed with someone forking their project and claiming some level of ownership.  This one in particular was just about editing bad words.

I could really spend ALL my time on this topic.

What not to add

So our site allows folks to add a new entry.  It still has to get voted on to go live on the main site, but this helps move things along.  The problem is we rarely see developers or newcommers follow the existing format.

One submission in particular basically showed what not to do when creating an entry.  This was cleaned up shortly after adding, but this conveniently made a list:



Some of the highlights:

• Over-emphasizing with words (unique, special, superfast) and via bold and capitalized text
• Tons and tons of categories
• Duplicating details about the program in the entry already covered by the entry itself (such as file size and the developer website)
• Frequent repetition of text (unique, easy, fast, etc.)
• Lots of linking inside the entry

In fairness, the last 6 lines were spot on.

Related: How to write/edit an entry

Open source survey

A fascinating look at what's happening in open source development that might give some indications on what's to come:

http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/

Cost of free

An article goes into all the problems with free and open software.  I drafted a response:

Definitely don't use a free browser or a free operating system (except all the major ones are).  Anything besides Microsoft Office is unacceptable (never mind that their support is notoriously bad).  Linux is open source and that's definitely been hijacked many times and caused all kinds of problems so now of course no one uses it except for most servers and most cell phones.

I didn't post it as the article is obviously clickbait nonsense, intentionally written to incite.  While it's wrong on so many levels and shouldn't be worth highlighting, sometimes you have to define your opposite.