OpenCandy

» see opencandy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The software I trusted was carrying this. That is the part of the OpenCandy story that lands differently from the rest of its category. CoolWebSearch and Direct Revenue arrived through holes and lies. OpenCandy arrived inside the installers of programs an engineer downloads on purpose.

It was a Windows library that a developer dropped into their own setup program. When you ran the installer, one screen in the sequence offered you a second piece of software, chosen by scanning what was already on your machine and where you were connecting from. If you took the offer, the developer got paid. The company behind it, SweetLabs of San Diego, described this in 2011 as bringing to small software vendors the thing the big ones already did for themselves.

The argument was not stupid. Free software has to eat, and the alternatives on the table were donation buttons that nobody clicks or a nag screen that turns into a paid version. OpenCandy offered a third option that did not cost the user any money. The problem was that the checkbox came pre-ticked, that the scan of your machine happened without anyone asking, and that these two facts together are the definition of the thing everybody had spent ten years learning to hate.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

Its own homepage in 2011 was written in the voice of a startup that expected to be liked. A banner apologized for needing JavaScript with the line "we hate to be a bummer," and asked you not to be a hater if things looked broken. A diagram explained the arrangement in the plainest terms it could manage: advertisers put products into the network, developers picked which of those offers their own installer would show. The pull quote on the page came from Neil McAllister at InfoWorld, calling it a community-based version of what Sun and Apple were already doing for their own products.

By the last capture in 2016 the copy had hardened into numbers. Two billion downloads and counting. First installer ad network in the industry. Six years as the leader in quality and transparency. And a customer testimonial that reads now like an epitaph: when you see "powered by OpenCandy," you know you can trust the app.

~ who was carrying it ~

The list of software that shipped OpenCandy is the reason this grave exists rather than the technical details, which are dull. FileZilla had it in 2013. So did mIRC, and WinSCP through August 2012, and Foxit Reader across three point releases, and PDFCreator, and ImgBurn in the build served from its own site but not the ones on the mirrors, and CDBurnerXP, and FrostWire, and GOM Player, and CamStudio, and the FL Studio installer, and μTorrent. Auslogics Disk Defrag had it. Format Factory had it.

Read those names as a working set rather than a list. That is an evening of moving files onto a server and burning what was left over to a disc. Every one of those programs was the sensible free choice in its category, the one you recommended to other people, and for a stretch of years every one of them was quietly taking a cut from a screen you clicked past without reading. The company's own website assets included partner icons for Notepad++, Wireshark, Pidgin, and 7-Zip, which tells you how respectable it believed the neighborhood to be.

~ what it cost them ~

The antivirus industry did not accept the distinction between polite bundling and hostile bundling, and it turned out the antivirus industry was the only opinion that mattered. Once OpenCandy's signature was in the definitions, any installer carrying it threw a warning, and a warning on your download page costs a free-software project more than the bundling deal ever paid.

So the client list unwound in the order you would expect, with the projects that cared most about their reputation leaving first. Trillian dropped it on 5 May 2011 and Sigil took it out at version 0.5.0. WinSCP stopped in August 2012. FreeFileSync held on until April 2018, two years after the thing was already dead, which is its own small comedy. There was even a workaround for the initiated, a /NOCANDY switch you could pass to some installers on the command line, honored only if the developer had bothered to wire it up. The escape hatch existed and almost nobody knew about it.

~ the last page ~

SweetLabs discontinued OpenCandy in August 2016. The company had already moved on years earlier to Pokki, a desktop app platform that raised $13 million from Intel and Google in September 2011 and later sold itself as a Start menu replacement for people who hated Windows 8. That business is where the attention went.

The archive is unusually clean about the ending. opencandy.com was captured serving its 4,745 byte marketing page on 30 June 2016, and there is no successful capture of that domain after it, at any point, through the present. The site did not decay into a placeholder or a domain sale notice the way most of these do. It went from selling two billion downloads to nothing at all, with no page in between.

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