Get rich quick

By Vincent Law

While you were playing with Legos, Jensen Harris, PC `98, and Tom Brown, PC `98, were coding in BASIC.

Now they're rich.

Brown and Harris made their money writing shareware, software written by independent programmers and distributed over the Internet. Shareware users can try out the software for free, paying for it only if they find it useful.

While only a small fraction of shareware users actually pay for the software, shareware authors can earn loads of cash. With low startup and distribution costs, a shareware author's revenues can turn into profit faster than you can say "registration fee."

An alarming utility

Harris has sold over 4,500 registered copies of his alarm clock program, CD Alarm. The utility allows Windows 95 and NT systems with CD-ROM drives to function as alarm clocks.

Envy motivated Harris to develop his shareware creation. Harris's sophomore year roommate had a clock-radio with a built-in CD player. Feeling discontented with the pathetic buzz of his own alarm, Harris wanted the functionality of his roommate's alarm clock without spending money for one. Hence, CD Alarm was born.

Harris originally had no plans to release CD Alarm; he had written it for his own use. Only after friends started to beg him for copies of the program did he think otherwise. In 1996, Harris released his first version of CD Alarm.

It's been a success ever since. "CD Alarm is one of the most popular alarm programs for Windows. It regularly gets more downloads than comparable programs on shareware sites like download.com," Harris said.

Although Harris is a music major, computers will probably remain a large factor in his future. He has spent the last two summers working at Microsoft and may go back after graduation. This past summer, he worked as a Program Manager for MS Outlook, one of the five applications in the Microsoft Office suite. "I had a great chance last summer to design the interface for a large part of Outlook," Harris said. "It is a huge kick to know that six months from now, millions of people are going to be using my designs several times a day."

Harris first started programming when he was five years old. "I wasn't old enough for school yet," Harris said, "so I had a lot of time to read through the BASIC manual which came with the computer."

Zip it good

Brown entered the shareware market in January of 1994 with ZipIt, a file compression utility for the Macintosh.

Before ZipIt, Macintosh users who needed to deal with files using the ZIP compression format--a format popular among PC users--were out of luck. Macintosh ZIP utilities were hard to use and short on features, a serious problem given the growing popularity of the Internet and the increase of cross-platform file sharing.

Brown started out trying to solve another problem entirely. "I was actually writing another program, a bulletin board maintenance utility, that needed to automatically zip files," Brown recalled. "I found that there was, at the time, no way to do that without writing my own zipping program." After seven months of coding and beta testing, he released ZipIt.

The program was an instant success. Although Brown does not have exact figures for registered users, he said "[It's] certainly in the tens of thousands." Brown still handles some registrations directly through receiving checks in the mail from users, but many are processed by SoftLock, a company that handles credit card registrations by phone and on the web for shareware authors.

With individual registrations costing $15 and business site-licenses ranging from $225 to $3000 per site, Brown is doing well. "To put it another way, I'm receiving pretty good pay for a full-time job," Brown said.

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