Author: O. Veli
Date: 11:29:42 12/26/99
A couple of years ago, I decided to buy Rebel 8, after playing for a while with the freeware Rebel Decade. I did not need it then, but I had the urge to buy it. I am still very happy with that decision. Decade led me to buy R8, I highly doubt that I would have bought it then if there were no Decade. I would like to thank Mr. Schroeder for providing Decade. It is a simple, yet highly effective idea of Mr. Schroeder to provide a freeware version to invite potential customers to buy the full version. It is very odd that there are no freeware versions of top level programs. A recent PC World issue gave a list of 100 top programs, and the chess program was Chess-It. I tried that program a year or so ago, and there are a lot of better programs out there. A person who is not into chess, or chess computers as we are, thinks highly of GNU chess, the one with its own GUI (not a whole lot of people know of Winboard :(( ). S/he may think that Chess-It is a very good program. On the other hand, if there were to be a master strength Fritz, Genius, Shredder, Nimzo, Junior, Hiarcs, or M-Chess Light, general public will have a much better freeware program to play with. Most of them will be happy with it, and some of them will want to buy the full version. This light version, if distributed with a highly known magazine such as PC Magazine, PC World, Chip, MacWorld, could reach thousands of people. I do not see anything that a programmer could lose in this. S/he may sell more copies. If not, at least the program will be known to more people. I do not know how hard it is to make a program play weaker, but I guestimate that it is not too much work. Maybe it is hard to get the attention of magazine editor, but we can break that with a couple of e-mails. I mentioned Decade and MacChess to some magazines, but did not get a reply.
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