With Apple’s introduction of an iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) last week, it seems everyone and their brother is hopping on the iPhone bandwagon or considering the jump. There are still some ...

The early 1980s saw the emergence of a new breed of software developers who gave their games away for free (usually through dial-up BBSs) in the hope that some players would enjoy the games enough to ...

More of China's programmers are writing shareware--home-brewed, low-cost software--for fun and small profit, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Unlike commercial software from behemoths ...

It’s not that you can’t pirate software today; there are still cracked versions of Office and Photoshop out there. But today’s best business software can’t be pirated. You can’t torrent Slack, pirate ...

Just like many people close to my age, I spent a lot of time as a kid playing Shareware games on our home PC. Better than a game demo, you could play the first "episode" of a game for free, but then ...

Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we'll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

Back before YouTube and Twitch and always online DRM, developers needed more effective ways of marketing than just relying on word of mouth. This resulted in shareware, demos and demo discs, free ...

You've probably heard the term bandied about in relation to Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, but shareware's roots go back far earlier. The concept originally emerged (accounts vary, but probably no earlier ...

Who doesn’t remember Commander Keen or Wolfenstein 3D, two great shareware games that helped many a gamer get into gaming. Today we celebrate those games with a gallery of eight of the most ...

Terms such as Freeware, Free software, Open source, Shareware, Trialware, Adware, Nagware, etc are often used to define programs. Does one really know the difference between freeware and free software ...

We're rerunning Richard Cobbett's classic Crapshoot column, in which he rolled the dice and took a chance on obscure games—both good and bad. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...