inessential by Brent Simmons

NetNewsWire 3.1 is free

NetNewsWire 3.1 is free!

By free I mean both that we’ve released it from its cage and that it costs no money. Zero dollars.

Upgrades are free. It’s free for new users. It’s freeware.

You can download it right away. Here are the change notes.

NetNewsWire is not alone—we’ve also made FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go! free.

Why go free? Nick Bradbury and Greg Reinacker explain it better than I would, but it boils down to this: the software is great marketing for our enterprise software; and the more users we have, the better able we are to calculate relevance and importance.

I dream of being able to make it so you spend less time reading stuff you don’t care about—I want the important news to go right to the top.

There’s a FAQ that explains a bunch of things—I’m not going to repeat it all here.

But I will say that, for me personally, this is a dream come true. Every developer wants to be able to work on the software they love, make a living at it, and give it to the world for free.

Usually you get to pick two out of three—if you’re lucky. Me, I get all three.