Is It A Bad Thing When Mac Software Is Free?

By Ron McElfresh | Monday, March 3, 2008 | Home » Commentary »

NewsFire What’s the price of free Mac software? What if the software is excellent, best-of-breed? Is it a bad thing when Mac software is free?

With a few exceptions, we’ve noticed a trend regarding Mac software. The prices are going up. There’s still plenty of value, and software has improved in usability in recent years, but the trend is unmistakable.

The Mac’s market is growing rapidly which increases the number of software users who want more from their Macs. Software developers are happy to oblige and produce even more titles in a competitive market.

That’s good for Mac users, right? After all, there’s plenty of freeware and open source software available, too. Think of the many Mac browsers available, all of them very good, and few of them have a price tag.

One of the most popular Internet functions to become available in recent years is RSS. Mac360 touted the benefits of an RSS news feeds, and an RSS reader for Mac users many years ago. These little utilities gather news headlines and summaries from many web sites and bring them to a single location on your Mac.

With Apple’s Safari web browser, users have a simple way to gather RSS news feeds right inside the browser, making web site headlines and summaries just a few clicks away.

Among the many RSS readers available for Mac users, we’ve touted the open source Vienna, the highly acclaimed NewsFire, and one of the earlier news readers, NetNewsWire.

Vienna is free, though it lacks many of the features and glitzy look and feel of the commercial Mac RSS readers. Did I say ‘commercial’ RSS news readers? That’s changed.

A few months ago, NewsGator, the publisher of the very popular, feature-laden NetNewsWire decided to provide the utility for free. Free. No real strings attached. Download it. Use it.

Having the most popular of anything suddenly become free has an impact on competing products. Remember Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? It was free. That made it difficult for Netscape to compete in a not-very-open market and the browser capabilities suffered under Microsoft’s dominance.

But free is good, right? Apple provides a very capable suite of applications in every Mac—iLife ‘08. Are they really ‘free’? You have to buy a Mac to get iLife or you have to shell out $79 to get the upgraded versions. Free becomes a relative term.

NetNewsWire was and remains the most popular RSS reader among Mac users (if our own site’s stats are any indication), so what is NewsGator’s incentive to continue to develop the product?

And what about competitors such as David Watanabe’s popular NewsFire?

It’s a tough business. Over the weekend Watanabe made NewsFire available for free. No strings. No nagware. No ads. Dowload it. Use it. It’s free.

The price of some excellent Mac software dropped from modest beyond nominal and all the way to free. What is the impact for Mac users? What will happen to further development of both NewsFire and NetNewsWire? What is the incentive for a software developer to continue to develop these applications? What happens to other RSS software?

Apple did the logical thing by including a modest but capable RSS reader in Safari, though features are limited, and paltry compared to the standalone readers, the price is really, really right, and a good way for new users to get into an RSS world.

Without a commercial incentive for continued development will either RSS reader be available for future Mac users?

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Classy Mac360 Photo By Ron McElfresh | My first Mac was the 128k model (from 1984, so I'm old). I live and work in Honolulu, Hawaii. Read my daily commentary on McSolo, check for certified Mac software updates on NoodleMac, and follow me on Twitter.

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