freeware

n. [common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by enthusiasts
and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin
boards, Usenet , or other electronic media. As the culture of the Internet
has displaced the older BBS world, this term has lost ground to both open
source and free software ; it has increasingly tended to be restricted to
software distributed in binary rather than source-code form. At one time,
freeware was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known
MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious
disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See shareware , FRS.

