
There’s no such thing as Free Software, someone, somewhere is paying for it. You may have to fill out a form with your demographic data or just be pulled onto a site that wants you to click their ads as well as their download link. Still, for very little cost to yourself there are incredibly useful pieces of software out there that don’t want to take your money (at least not directly). Free software comes in many different varieties as well, but here are 5 sites that I visit for free software and they all cater to a different market:
- Giveaway of the Day – One piece of software is given away everyday, but you must download and register the software within the 24 hour period that it’s available or the carriage turns back into a pumpkin and the software goes back to it’s regular price. You’ll see a lot of duplicate types of software but it ranges pretty widely.
- Game Giveaway of the Day – Giveaway of the Day’s sister site, but you’ll only find games here!
- Take My Tech – This is a less traditional way to get free software, have someone else give it away randomly to you after they are finished with it. The owner of the site, Jason Burns, is driving traffic to his site by giving away old hardware/ software/ etc. and trying to make enough from ads to cover his shipping at a minimum.
- Handango is giving away one (1) high quality, fully-functioning mobile software application for FREE on Fridays! The free app is available from 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. CST on Friday only. In addition, the promotion features other applications at a 25% discount throughout the week. Just visit www.handango.com/FreeAppFriday for details. All you have to do is complete a short survey. Handango will then send you an email with a link so you can download your free app. They are calling the promotion, “Free App Friday.”
- Last, but by no means least, there are tons of Open Source projects out there that make their software freely available, if you don’t know where to start then head over to SourceForge.net and find anything you might want! If that’s overwhelming then take a look at the past Projects of the Month for software that might interest you!