I know I’ve neglected this blog for a long while, but I finally found something worth taking a break to rant about!

I am just now finding out about all the shady dealings that CNet’s Download.com has been up to. This site used to be the place to download software from… granted, that was in the 90s when there were only a few hundred websites total. But when I used Windows full time, this was the site I always went to to find new software.

Until now.

In short, they are now taking legitimate software (like mine) and bundling it into new installers that are engineered to trick users into installing malware (browser toolbars, trojans, viruses, and such). I’m not usually one to mince words. This pisses me off, plain and simple. Why? Because every person who is tricked into installing that crap will blame my software for screwing up their systems, when in reality it’s not my fault at all. And, to be quite frank, it’s expressly against my licensing terms for anybody to build a new installation package for my software. That includes big sites like Download.com.

So, I’m pulling all my software listings from their site, effective immediat… er… effective as soon as they respond to my support email. I guess they anticipated an exodus and decided it was best to not allow anyone to remove a software listing from their site. They force their users to go through support channels, where I expect they’ll attempt to sell me upgraded listing packages that don’t include this malware crap. Starting to sound like a protection racket yet? (Nice little software you have there; would be a shame if something happened to it…)

And they’ll probably tell me that I agreed to their distribution terms when I signed up for the site, which is false, because I actually read the terms all those years ago and there was no mention of them doing this. Which means they probably amended the terms and neglected to inform me.

As soon as I get this resolved, my entire account on their site will go away. But you can always get our software directly from our site, where we have original packages I created that include no malware, spyware, crapware, or anything else. Because we actually care about our users.