"Deja vue" I thought and lo and behold - http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...

August 2007. How lovely of Watchguard to repackage the article, stamp its own copyright and publish it as "news".

They do link to that article, both at the beginning and at the end of their story.

More than 10 years ago, I made a website called UCACA [Under Construction And Collecting Awards]. It collected about 17 awards. It was eligible for one award because it had already had two other awards. One fellow noted that the site met all of his criteria for an award (originality, fast access, good design). However, he didn't give me the award on the basis that it would make a mockery of his award. Others were far less discriminating.

A thread in the WatchGuard article, which I didn't see in the original, starts in the 1st line: "...highlights the risky side of relying on freeware and shareware for any mission-critical purpose."

I would attribute the risk more to a lack of knowledge and experience with ones software than the free-ness or non-free-ness.

Indeed. I am the author of the original article. I was out to expose sordid practices by download sites, not to vilify any class of software.

The article says that he "had a third party submit his file to just about every software aggregation site", it would be handy to know how many that was, so that we can divide 16 by it.

It gives numbers in the original blog post:

http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...

"According to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions began “awardmestars” is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the sites that listed the software emailed me that it had won an award (I don’t know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win quite a few more awards yet."

"Addendum 2 -- 23 awards ‘won’ at the latest count."

It is all in the original article: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards... And there is an update: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/12/13/the-software-awards...

there are software available on the net that do this automatically for you.

see at: http://www.google.com/search?q=auto+submit+your+software

Reminds me of web hosting review sites stuffed with affiliate links. Of course they're ranked in order of highest to lowest commission.

Shareware download sites is another thing Google has eliminated the need for.

i knew i had read that after one sentence. thanks huhtenberg for linking to the original.