Bits 'n Bolts Is Defunct

[Varjak]

Someone ought to create a non-profit consortium to aggregate these 'orphan apps.' There were some real good ones. I wish I had the resources to do it. I will say it surprises me that these publishers don't 'open the floodgates' and give the apps away or for a nominal sum before closing shop.

[hal]

Someone ought to create a non-profit consortium to aggregate these 'orphan apps.' There were some real good ones. I wish I had the resources to do it. I will say it surprises me that these publishers don't 'open the floodgates' and give the apps away or for a nominal sum before closing shop.

I think, my friend, that it's just there where it started with freewarepalm.com, and freeware-palm.com, and palm-freeware.com, and palmopensource... and f-reewarepalm.com and fr-eewarepalm.com if they even exist

I am pretty sure that many of these websites started totally different to the abandonware junkyards that they are today. Most likely they surfaced as the "open" option to the apps marketplaces that were becoming mainstream. Cause BTW I don't give a rip what the iTribe says, the whole thing didn't start with the iTunes store. PalmGear predated it for more than half a decade, and the Windows Marketplace by more than the decade (until it closed of course). It is a common happening, that a same event mirrors different glances, so while there's somebody selling something, there's somebody else offering the freeware, and somebody else selling just the pieces so the tinkerers have at it, and somebody giving away discarded pieces and so on.

I think that one of the factors that turned those websites into junkyards is the absence of a solid business model, and in second place of course the lack of upgrades to the apps they offer. And in these days I wonder if the ads could pay for it all. Softpedia (US) and Softonic (Spain) have much better catalogue but they first rely on a much better business model than freewarepalm.com (put the hyphen where you feel like ). If you ask me, I think that the powers to be at Brighthand should have spoken to the brass at TechTarget in order to get some money and grab all the catalog of the superb places like MyTreo.net, remember that one? Even grab both the apps catalog and the whole fora repository, cause it was a helluva knowledgepot.

[Varjak]

I didn't realize those sites aggregated what had been paid-ware. I'll have to look. But great paid apps like Backupman and WordSmith etc. deserve to live on. Good idea about mytreo.net, etc. and BH.

[hal]

I didn't realize those sites aggregated what had been paid-ware. I'll have to look. But great paid apps like Backupman and WordSmith etc. deserve to live on. Good idea about mytreo.net, etc. and BH.

Ah, well, not everything at those sites has been necessarily payware. Those sites aggregate what external contributors wish to submit. Ideally, it's only freeware, but here and there you find tricky contributions of shareware. The whole point is (or was) to make a repository of freeware, and the contributor has to solve on his own & beforehand how come something is freeware, whether it's freeware ever since, or it was shareware and the owner declined royalties, or if it's abandonware, and so on. If a developer/owner claims something for finding its property over there, those sites have a null muscle to challenge such claim, so it has to be totally solved beforehand. Besides, you can find that a lot of corporations submitted applications as freeware, in a focus that enhanced their business, i.e. like RoboForms, cause the Palm app was freeware, but not the whole fat thing of implementing RoboForms. Just in case you hadn't heard of it, RoboForms is kinda Microsoft InfoPath of the recent past.

There are ex-payware apps at those websites, usually you can tell cause they still demand a registration, and sometimes it still has to be received via developer/owner, but at a $0.00 cost. There are also others that are currently payware and are not offered, but rather the whole constellation of their beta tests is over there (like Today for Palm OS, by Jonas Lindstedt).

Yes, I hope that sites such as Brighthand consider grabbing the whole mytreo.net and the likes. We would do so much with it over here!