Hi, David. I would have emailed you, but neither the NewsFire site nor its associated blog provide an obvious email address. So I'm just going to post this into the ether in the hope it gets to you at some point.

One of the more annoying things about writing software is that everyone has an opinion about how you should go about being compensated for it. Believe it or not, we've even had someone complain that we don't charge people enough. Even if you take the plunge and don't charge for your software, you end up in a gigantic minefield.

Pretty much every voice in the conversation is a selfish one, which doesn't help, starting from a position of "which license would suit me best?"

So here's my selfish, unsolicited opinion on why NewsFire's shareware restrictions are broken. :)

NewsFire is a good-looking product. I tried it out a few times during the beta, but not seriously. Now that you've reached 1.0 (congrats), I thought I'd give it a proper run.

The only real way to test-drive an aggregator is to use it. If it annoys me less than the alternatives, it's a keeper. Shareware is cool like this - I can download the trial, use it to track my feeds for a week or two, and then decide if it's worth the asking-price.

Which is why this was annoying:

In evaluating NewsFire, I'm most interested in how it will help me manage the volume of feeds I plan to subscribe to -- a modest selection, certainly not of Scoble-like proportions, but still more than 25. If I can't subscribe the NewsFire trial to this many feeds, I can't really evaluate it effectively. And since there's any number of alternatives I can evaluate effectively for free, the value proposition of paying for NewsFire on trust just doesn't pan out.

So my personal, selfish opinion is that for an RSS reader, a limited-subscription trial isn't the best choice.