[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.