Open Educational Resources (OER)
In the late 1990s, I did several workshops for teachers that I called "Educational Software on a Zero Budget."
In those sessions, I would show participants what we called shareware, freeware and careware. The term "open software" was not really being used.
Shareware was software that you tried and decided whether or not it's right for you. If you liked it, you paid a nominal fee for the full-featured program. If you didn't want to keep it, shareware programs usually stopped functioning after a period of time or they continued to work but did not have all of the full version’s features.
Freeware was just what you would expect - it was free. The software was developed just for the sake of providing you, the end user, with a cool new application. If you really liked the program, you might take a moment to send the author a note or comments, but there are no strings attached to these programs.
We always had a discussion about this idea of giving away software. Teachers had lots of questions: Why would anyone take the time to create software and then make no money for their work? Was it legal to use? What's the catch? Is it really lousy software and that's why it's free?
I would compare it to being a volunteer. Why do work for no pay? Are volunteers good workers?
Careware was what we called software that was freely distributed by way of download. The only “payment” expected for careware was that if users make upgrades to the program, that they contribute those upgrades to the community that offers the download.
All of these, but especially careware, led to the open software, open source and all the subsequent open movements. Open textbooks, open courseware and even open universities followed.
A few of those original repositories of software still exist (tucows.com and download.com for example), but many of them have fallen away.
I remember when I wanted to create PDF documents for my classes that I couldn't afford a $250 copy of Adobe Acrobat. Instead I bought PrintToPDF Shareware for $20. It was a Macintosh printer driver that created PDF files. It didn't have all the features of the Adobe product, but I could convert my documents to pdf format. Now, I can just save a document from Word or Google Docs in the pdf file format.