Do you really want to spend $10 for a free download?   Some of the best FREE computer programs are being sold for money here on eBay.  If you find a program that promises to record music, remove the lyrics, make artwork, or which promises to be a "clone" of your favorite office applications, all for a really cheap price, you may be paying for something that's meant to be free, and can be downloaded and installed FOR FREE, RIGHT NOW.  One such vendor (I can't name names in this guide) has even gone so far as to rewrite the code of these programs so buyers won't find out who originally designed the programs, or that they were meant to be FREE SOFTWARE.  Since these programs have been written by volunteers and distributed for free for years, this begins to approach the ethical "gray area."

Under the terms of their licenses, at least some of these programs are free to distribute in any way, even to sell on eBay, with certain conditions.  So if you should purchase a copy of Audacity, or Open Office, or the GIMP (or any of these programs disguised as something else) here on eBay, you aren't acting illegally.  All that you are doing is paying for something which is a free and easy download.  If you just have to give somebody money for free software, why not donate it to the people who wrote the program and made it free for anybody then? 

Hey, you don't even have to do that.  It's meant to be free.

So if you find yourself tempted to purchase some program for a price that's too good to be true, you may not be breaking the law, but you could be getting duped into paying for something that was really meant to be free.   Programs that are often sold on ebay in this way include (eBay forbids me to provide you direct links in this guide, so just paste the names of these programs into a search engine like Google):

Audacity -- An absolutely AWESOME music making and audio recording program -- FREE FREE FREE!
Open Office -- a program designed to work with Microsoft Office files for free -- FREE FREE FREE!
The GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) -- One of the very best artwork programs you can get! -- FREE FREE FREE!

And there is a whole world of free software or shareware websites such as Tucows, Nonags, Cnet, Major Geeks, and lots of others.  There are websites dedicated to free or shareware music software exclusively, also, such as Hitsquad, KVR, or Databaseaudio.  Once again, I am not suposed to give you direct links, but you can look it up in a search engine using any of these keywords.  And by the way, if you download these free programs instead of buying them on a disk, you can install them right now!

This guide is not necessarily intended to discourage you from paying for free software.  It is just to let you know your options, since some of these guys don't make it clear that you can download what they are selling for free, with no strings attached, and that is exactly what they have done, and are now trying to make some small profit from your lack of knowledge.  In the best case, some of these disks that you can buy on ebay come with large compilations of freebies so the seller is actually performing a service of sorts, by putting them all on one disk for you.  On the other hand, one vendor I am forbidden to name in this guide is taking a free program, rewriting the code so the original name of the program is replaced with his own brand name, and charging you a couple bucks for it and then $7.00 shipping for one envelope with a CD in it. 

Ripoff?  You be the judge.  But let your judgments be informed ones.