NewsGator scraps licence fee for popular Mac RSS reader

 

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Posted on 10 Jan 2008 at 09:42

NewsGator has announced that henceforth its popular RSS reader NetNewsWire will be free.

NetNewsWire joins three more apps for which NewsGator will no longer charge: FeedDemon and Inbox, both Windows feed readers, and Mobile RSS Reader, which as the name suggests is for phones.

Developer Brent Simmons said that NetNewsWire's $24.95 had been scrapped in order to encourage adoption of feed technologies.

"The software is great marketing for our enterprise software; and the more users we have, the better able we are to calculate relevance and importance," he wrote in a blog posting.

While the move has been widely welcomed, not everyone happy, least of all those who have only recently paid for the software.

"What happens if - like me - you PAID for NetNewsWire Pro in the past month or so and now (in anticipation of version 3.00) and now find that your purchase was, in fact, a waste of money???," wrote spk in a response to Simmons's post.

And Brian raised the point that registered users have effectively paid to act as beta testers for the free version.

"I bought 3.0 last summer. Had loads of problems with feed synchronization. I've spent hours (cumulatively) syncing, starting over, un-subscribing and re-subscribing and generally fighting with NNW," he replied.

"So glad I paid for the privilege of beta testing software that wasn't ready for release."

Equally unimpressed is Paul Kafasis, chief executive of Mac developer Rogue Amoeba.

"Simply put, when NetNewsWire was for sale, there was a market opening in which to sell competing RSS readers on the Mac," he notes. "Now that NetNewsWire is free, that market just got rocked. It may well cease to exist, at least in any viable way for a full-time developer. If competing with a popular, well-designed product is tough, competing with a popular, well-designed product that happens to be free (while remaining fully-funded) is damned near impossible. And that's unfortunate, because ultimately, it's likely to lead to stagnation."

What's more, according to Kafasis, "the perceived value of software on the Mac just went down".

"There's certainly a place for free software,' he writes. "But when a fully-featured product such as NetNewsWire is suddenly free, it effectively reduces the value of other for-pay software products."

And ultimately that leads to poorer software.

"Very rapidly, you'd see a shrinking of the market, a loss of innovation, and ultimately, a decrease in quality. There's no market for commercial software on Linux, and the quality of solutions simply isn't on par with what's available on the Mac."

Author: Simon Aughton