Shareware is usually offered as a trial version with certain features only available after the licence is purchased, or as a full version, but for a trial period. Once the trial period has passed the program will not run until a licence is purchased. Shareware is often offered without support, updates, or help menus, which only become available with the purcase of a licence. The words "free trial", "trial version" are indicative of shareware.

The term shareware is used in contrast to, retail software which refers to commercial software available only with the purchase of a licence which may not be copied for others, and public domain software which refers to software not copyright protected, and Freeware which refers to copyrighted software for which the author solicits no payment (though he may request a donation).

History

The term "shareware" predates the IBM PC. In the early days of personal computers (late 70's) there were few programs available. Many "computer hobbyists" simply wrote there own programs when there was nothing available to do the job. They shared these programs with other enthusiasts freely. The terms "freeware" and "shareware" were loosely used to distinguish them from commercial programs.

Popular Usage: In 1982, Andrew Fluegelman created a program for the IBM PC called PC-Talk, a telecommunications program, he used the term freeware. About the same time, Jim "Button" Knopf released PC-File, a database program, calling it user-supported software. Not much later, Bob Wallace produced PC-Write, a word processor, and called it shareware. Appearing in an episode of Horizon titled Psychedelic Science originally broadcast 5 April, 1998, Bob Wallace said the idea for shareware came to him "to some extent as a result of my psychedelic experience."

In 1984, Softalk-PC magazine had a column, The Public Library, about such software. Public domain is a misnomer for shareware, and Freeware was trademarked by Fluegelman and could not be legally used by others, and User-Supported Software was too cumbersome. So columnist Nelson Ford held a contest to come up with a better name.

The most popular name submitted was Shareware, which was being used by Wallace. However, Wallace acknowledged that he got the term from an InfoWorld magazine column by that name in the 1970's, and that he considered the name to be generic,Fact: date=January 2008 so its use became established over freeware and user-supported software.

Fluegelman, Knopf, and Wallace clearly established shareware as a viable software marketing method. Via the shareware model, Button, Fluegelman and Wallace became millionaires.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, shareware software was widely distributed over bulletin board systems globally and on diskettes (and subsequently, CD-ROMs) by commercial shareware distributors who produced catalogs of up to thousands of public domain and shareware programs. One such distributor, Public Software Library (PSL), began an order-taking service for programmers who otherwise had no means of accepting credit card orders.