Jonathan's Universe

So, the a long time ago, I stumbled upon a website called Giveaway of the Day. Every day they give out a single program (that normally costs money) for free. It’s legal. It’s done via an agreement between the program developers and the GAOTD team. This in-concept is pretty cool. Infact they even have a Game Giveaway of the Day too.. but only on weekends.

Here’s the details:

Every day at 12:00 AM Pacific (3:00 AM Eastern) a new program is released. This program is only available for download on the given day. When you download the program, there is usually an activator involved. You click it before installing the program (or after depending on the software package) and it automatically sets you up to use this software (don’t have to register or buy anything). There’s some problems though.

Viruses?
Reading through comments of some files, it seems that some of them have some sort of malware embedded into them. The website has a guarantee that all software is checked for malware, but with every 5th or so program.. there’s reports of a virus? Hmm, makes me uneasy. But then again, you should always scan downloaded files for viruses. That goes without saying.

Variety
There’s not really any variety in the programs offered. Every now and then you get a cool killer app., but often enough, it’s something to do with videos. AVI Video converter, iPod video converter, FLV video encoder. Though to be fair, it seems lately there have been more variety than when I first found the site. But Jesus, why does the Gnome Screensaver keep being offered? And why would anyone normally pay $20.00 for that. Most of the games are puzzle-based games, which kind of sucks.

License
You’re pretty much given a demonstrative-user license. They always prohibit you from using the programs you acquire from them for non-commercial purposes. Uh.. okay, I’ll use my business card maker for non-commercial purposes. Because that makes sense.

Ridiculous Programs
Some programs offered are just ridiculous. Why sell somethng Windows already has? Though.. every now and then you get a potential gold mine, depending on what you do.

I’d check them out, but don’t expect neat software very often.