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23 August 2011

Ugly Wrapping At Download.com

Even though we always recommend download of our products from the kalmstrom.com website, we also present them at other sites. This is done to reach more people, and since the download links still are ours, we can be sure that downloaders get what we want to give them.

However, the well known cnet site Download.com requires that they host the download file themselves, so that the products are downloaded from their site. We have accepted it because this is one of the major download sites, and we wanted our products to be seen there. It worked well for many years, except that they did not always had the latest version of our products. Now it does NOT work well anymore, and we have decided to remove all our products from Download.com.

The reason for this drastic decision is that we cannot trust Download.com anymore. They have started to wrap other downloads into installers, which is totally unacceptable to kalmstrom.com. This means that you cannot be sure that you will only get what you want if you download a software from Download.com. You might also get other programs that you don't wish to use or are even aware of. These programs may make unwanted changes to your system, and they may also be difficult to get rid of.

This sounds like a violation of developer rights, but cnet has cleverly avoided it by the wording of their terms of service. They can also claim that they have notified developers about the wrapping, even if it was just in one sentence a bit down in a newsletter and not in very clear words!

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions will never accept that our installation files give users anything else than a clean, genuine version of the kalmstrom.com software. Therefore we asked Download.com to remove all our products from their site immediately.

We also advice against downloading from Download.com. My guess is that the wrapping in the end will be fatal for Download.com. In the long run you cannot fool people  they are too smart for that and turn to other, more trustworthy sites.

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