freeware

Freeware (logiciel gratuit) is enslaving; usually the source is even not available, so I cannot verify that freeware software (logiciel gratuit) doesn't do something evil in my back.

Many open source and freeware apps in the Windows world are turning to less-preferable means of supporting themselves such as bundleware.

Previously this project was freeware (closed source) so our 2.x version remained freeware and our 3.0 was only available as a subscription sold in chunks of 1 year-subscriptions as opposed to monthly).

The Usenet group alt.comp.freeware converted several people to the idea of open source by having links to sourceforge posted there.

That led to an active European freeware, shareware, and eventually open source software scene.

But do you remember how often Windows 3.1 freeware / shareware apps crashed?

There are a bunch of freeware CD-burning apps that can burn an ISO for you if you don't have Nero/Roxio; CDBurnerXP comes to mind.

For Windows, Ninite covers a decent range of basic freeware and open source software, and Chocolatey covers a lot more but is less user-friendly.

This is not a copyright issue at all; the rule would apply equally to freeware as well as to programs which are not freely redistributable.

An example, there use to be this guy names Fred Fish who would compile Amiga freeware onto floppies and trade them at Amiga user group meetings.

And there's no reason to buy a CD of a compilation of mostly crappy freeware/shareware anymore, everyone can just browse the internet and download whatever they like.

I agree that the term shareware is dead, but time limited or feature limited freeware with a paid full version is not dead.

For instance Quake 1 had a "flight sim" of sorts that was basically done by one guy using Quake-C and some simple, freeware, modeling tools.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying something like "there are now several projects/products that aim to alleviate this problem, such as ProjectA and ProjectB." Also f.lux is freeware.

"free software" is not the same as "freeware", which by commonly accepted usage is almost always reffering to proprietary software that is distributed at no cost.

In that case, the parent could have asked, "Would it outrage you if someone slapped a GUI on your code and released it as freeware?" I think they didn't because even fewer readers would see the harm in that.

Freeware is irrelevant to the discussion, it is just proprietary software that happens to have a zero price.