Comment by EarlKing

OK, this seems like a good thread to ask about something that was contemporary to the TI-99/4A ... namely, the idea of "Fairware". As near as I can tell this term was coined to refer to freeware at a time when that term was still trademarked by Andrew Fluegelman / Headlands Press, and seems largely to have been current among TI-99/4A users (probably because after their platform got orphaned freeware/fairware was all they had), but not so much anywhere else (with a few exceptions, and then probably because by the time anyone had heard of it Andrew was dead and his trademark died not long after, so everyone took to calling freeware 'freeware'... or shareware, since that term had also been coined to get around that trademark).

Anyway, the question is: Who actually coined the term "fairware"? I did some preliminary research in old periodicals and books, but I never came to a satisfactory answer. The closest I found it that it might have been one of the sysops of the TI conference on ... I think either Compuserve or GEnie? Either way, I never found any smoking gun, and this is one of those bits of historical trivia where not knowing the answer irritates me greatly. I tried asking around on the Atari Age forums, but I guess the right kind of graybeards don't hang out around there. Maybe someone here will know the answer?