This came to me earlier today and I need to share my dislike. I remember a particular program I used to have on my Mac that scanned your disk and gave you a report of free space, and where your disk space was going, showing large files, and grouping file types so you can see how big your MP3 collection is.

At some point during the course of development, there was an upgrade to this freeware application, which I dutifully installed looking forward to some random bug fixes I would never encounter.

What I did encounter was that the developer had suddenly decided that he wanted to charge for this application, and so pushed out an update to all versions to make it shareware. So the next time I fired it up, I was prompted for a serial number and asked to purchase a copy of the software.

I’ve got nothing against buying software. I’ve bought a Tiger, Leopard and will buy Snow Leopard, I bought VMWare Fusion cos I had a need for it, and I bought SuperDuper cos it was a great bit of software. But I knew going into that that I’d eventually have to pay for the software. It wasn’t sprung on me.
I do have something against being forced to pay for something which I was previously getting for free, just cos the dev had a change of heart. Especially to do it in such a sneaky way as a software update. If you want to charge for your product, then release a new paid only version, stop development and updating the old version, and do a clean cut over. Offer new features and support for the product, but don’t sneak in through the backdoor and demand money.