I write software. Lots of software. I make a lot of software available, online, with sources, for free. I spend many spare time hours doing this.

I usually post information about software updates to a few sites I know are good sites to post on, sites I know my "audience" is visiting so that they get to know about my new releases. There are also a few site admins that subscribe to my announcement mailing lists or that poll the necessary web pages automatically to detect when I release new stuff.

They are all nice, good, fine and important for my software to reach my audience, the users of my software.

Nowadays, I get emailed almost on a daily basis by administrators that open up new sites, or run an old site and they just fell over my email address somewhere (very often I guess because they found another download site with my software on it). They want me to post, update and publish my stuff over at their site(s). (For some reason, these sites are almost always devoted to Windows-only programs) They all have millions of visitors (so they say), they all offer many many new users of my software and very often they do banner advertising or even are selling CDs with free software on.

They want to sit there relaxing, while the authors themselves update their sites, so that they get visitors and get money and whatever. What do I get? Let's say that some of their promises are met and I get more users of my 100% free software. Why would I sweat a lot for that? If I were to give just a fraction of all those sites my attention and post updates to them, it would become next to a full-time job. I wouldn't even know which ones I should go with and which that are bad (as I'm sure there are gems hidden among them), they're just too many too similar too boring.

No, I won't update my software information in your software index site. There's no point in me doing that. Feel free to update the information yourself, subscribe to our announcement mailing list or just grab whatever info there's lying around on the web site. I'll appreciate it a lot if you do.

Really good free software gets spread, discussed and used no matter what I do or not. If people find the software useful and good, they'll use it, spread the word and distribute the release archives. They'll recommend it to friends and tell others in discussion forums.

I can't see the point in me advertising my software on more download sites.

Include freshmeat, sourceforge, opensourcedirectory, GNU directory and a few more I've forgotten here. Unfortunalty, appwatch.org is not with us anymore...