It's now free? But I paid for it!

I was checking my RSS and atom feeds yesterday when I got the only-slightly-annoying popup to tell me a new version of Shrook (a wonderful news aggregator for us Mac typs) was anxiously awaiting my pending install.

Dutifully, I clicked through to the download page and there, just below the "Download" button was that most-desired-label on the web: Freeware!

WTF? I paid for this application when it was back in its 1.x days, and now they're giving it away for FREE?!?

Quickly hopping over to the Shrook blog (you know there had to be one), I see that Graham's shared his rationale:

So a few months ago I went a bit crazy and declared war on Brent Simmons and NetNewsWire. It's taken me a while to work out what to do and to put all the pieces in place, but this is what I'm doing: I'm making the full version of Shrook freeware.

This isn't a temporary promotion and this isn't a sign of abandoning Shrook. I just want as many people as possible to be using it, because it is better than NetNewsWire and NewsFire and everything else out there. Shrook fans (that's you) can now recommend it to their friends without requiring them to spend money.

Not sure how I feel about financing yet another war. (The first one I'm financing courtesy the IRS isn't going too well) But it would seem Graham's logic, albeit unconventional, is sound.

Now I can recommend Shrook to everyone I know without the caveat "it'll cost you $25, but it's worth it." Go ahead, download it today. Oh, and add my feed to your channel list.