If you didn’t know of a website called Giveaway of the Day, basically they work together with software publishers in providing free licenses to shareware for everyone within a 24 hours period. There is a different commercial software being offered for free everyday and theoretically you can only activate the software within the giveaway period. Once the giveaway period has expired, you won’t be able to install the software even if you keep the package downloaded from GAOTD. Most of the installer are custom made for giveaway of the day. So even if the readme.txt file contains the registration key for the software, the registration key cannot be used on the installer that you downloaded from the official website. Other than the 24 hours activation limitation, most if not all of the free license given to GAOTD users are not upgradeable to future versions. Technical support on the software is not provided as well and the software is strictly for non-commercial usage. No matter what, a legally registered or activated shareware is still better than a trial or even cracked versions.
There is a weakness in the giveaway of the day wrapper where it extracts the setup installer of the software to the temporary folder in Windows and you can actually use that setup installer to reinstall the software at a later time bypassing the 24 hours giveaway restriction. I bet most people already knew about it because you can literally find guides on how to do that all over the Internet. Interestingly our forum moderator shared with us a tool called Giveaway Forever which is able to automatically detect the setup installer in temporary folder and save it on your computer in order to install it later.
Giveaway Forever program is in Italian and allows you to easily grab the Giveawayoftheday setup installer with just a few clicks of a button. First click on the Sfoglia button to browse for the ZIP file that you’ve downloaded from Giveaway of the day’s website. Then click the huge “Genera File per l’installazione Illimitata” button which will automatically extract the zip file, run the setup.exe, detect the setup installer from temporary folder and copies it to Documents folder. Finally click the Vai ai Giveaway button which will open the My Documents folder to access the original setup installer file.
Do note that this tool will only work on software that are still in the giveaway period because Giveaway of the Day wrapper does not extract the setup installer to temporary folder when the giveaway has expired.