Okay so perhaps you need to understand:
1) Software offered free registration required, no bait and switch no
small print. You knew you would have to come back.
2) Costs them next to nothing to send registrations, serial generation
and email both items that can be offloaded from the web serving
infrastructure. That said even nothing adds up and will eventually
exceed the best capacity planning of an IT department.
3) Your coming back filling out the additional information means your
a real user not just a fly by night person who got the serial number
just because it was cool. The data collected means they can go to
investors and clients and do what businesses do with that data. They
are offering you a year of support this costs them money and again you
knew you would be back.
They didn't design a defective product or system, they designed a good
system which weeds out users who do the latest cool thing but don't
follow through. What happened to that good system was they under
estimated the appeal/demand. The number of companies small and large
that have been bitten by the same bug is to long to list.
When you design a delivery system that is capable of delivering the
same user experience when hit by 100 simultaneous users or 100
thousand simultaneous users without breaking the bank nor increasing
capacity then your welcome to "banter" about their defective by design
issues.
Until then you just come off as a jerk.
You tied together issues to make a point about a company which has
done more to support OSS and wine specifically in such a lowbrow way
that well I stepped up.
Finally to finish my pile on http://www.aolsvc.merriam-webster.aol.com/dictionary/bander
or http://www.dictionarist.com/bander
