Operating system | Website giveawayoftheday.com | |
Type Free Software Download Site | ||
Giveaway of the Day (often abbreviated GOTD) is a website that offers commercially licensed Windows (and occasionally Mac) software for free without software updates or technical support. Each software offered on the site is free only on a specific date, and protection software included with the download will only activate the free license if the software is installed on the correct date. Though the project prohibits commercial usage, individual software publishers may allow otherwise in the end user license agreement for their own software. The site was launched on 24 October 2006.
Contents
- Previous titles and charge on Giveaway of the Day
- User criticism
- Mac Giveaway of the Day
- Game Giveaway of the Day
- Competitors
- References
The site runs in several languages including English (original language), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Romanian, Greek, Turkish and Russian.
Giveawayoftheday.com is ranked #938 in the world according to three-month Alexa traffic rankings on 11 September 2011. The site is ranked #1,182 in the US, where it is estimated that 19% of its visitors are located. It is also popular in Indonesia, where it is ranked #357. Giveaway of the day project is ranked #968 in The 1000 most-visited sites on the web by Google.
Previous titles and charge on Giveaway of the Day
Categories of software on Giveaway of the Day include system tools, shell replacements, video and photo editing tools, office add-ons, file format converters, screen-savers and others. Software titles offered by Giveaway of the Day are free if downloaded from the Giveaway of the Day website.
User criticism
Since the giveaway software must be installed and registered during 24-hour period (with no right of further re-installations), some users regard the software given away as trialware. There has also been some user criticism of the quality and origin of the software given away, including complains about high proportion of utility software, format converters, screensavers and other simple tools.
Giveaway of the Day use in-house developed wrapper software to ensure that every particular product can only be installed on the day of promotion by connecting to their server and checking giveaway availability.
Initially GOTD used relatively simple technique to protect the installation package which eventually led to the situation when a lot of titles previously featured on Giveaway of the Day became available on numerous warez sites. On top of that some websites provided step-by-step protection circumvention guides. Thus GOTD started losing trust of its vendors and had to take potentially unpopular measures. In July 2012 the team announced a new release of the wrapper, informing the users about integration of Themida software developed by Oreans Technologies into the wrapper as an additional protection mechanism. Some users were outraged by these measures and went as far as call Themida a "spyware". Also the new wrapper caused issues due to false positive alerts from several security software products at first.
Site's administration is also accused of tough comment moderation policy. Some even claim that all negative feedback is being removed from comments sections and forums.
Giveaway of the Day regularly features software from companies that infringe on the copyrights of other software. For example, the 1 July 2012 giveaway of Ideal DVD Copy infringed on the copyright of the FFmpeg and libav projects. Often, the corporations, companies, and individuals who publish content on the site are actually pseudonyms for made-up and erroneous businesses. An example would include the 6 April 2010 giveaway of LeKuSoft DVD Ripper. The vendor develops programs under different company names, which appeared to have the same whois information, and all of them violated the license of libav.
Mac Giveaway of the Day
At the end of the 2008 Giveaway announced in the blog their plans to launch similar project for Mac products. Even though the idea was highly appreciated and supported by the users community the project team didn’t step forward with it. Сurrently GOTD occasionally offers Mac applications together with giveaways for Windows (usually by the same developer).
Game Giveaway of the Day
On 11 December 2006 a new site was launched, Game Giveaway of the Day, which gave away games each day. Later, these giveaways were restricted to weekends. Since 29 April 2009, the beta website has been giving away games on a monthly basis. When Game Giveaway of the Day stopped on weekdays, one user and his team on the forums (Whiterabbit-uk, wizzard_of_ozz2004, reverseOrder, and thewebmaster) have been posting freeware games. The team is highly appreciated for their work by the GOTD community.