There is a common misconception that charityware is necessarily of lower standard than commercial software. It is certainly not necessarily so.

C. E. Steuart Dewar from Pimlico Software wrote:

I don't call [my software] "charityware" for the simple reason I don't want to scare people away - DateBk and Pimlical are among the best calendar applications written for any operating system and I get enough grief from users saying they almost didn't buy it because they assumed as "charityware" - "careware" - etc. that it would not be up to the finest "commercial" standards of software (which they are).

The quality of the charityware really depends on the attitude of the developers. Some software companies offer their old, no longer supported software as charityware, keeping their best products on a commercial, non-charityware license.

But other developers really do care a lot about seeing their hard work benefit those who need most our help. They are passionate about two things: creating high quality software, and helping charities in the process.

Some of those software have even received awards, e.g.:

• Vim: a very popular text editor, Bram Moolenaar's Vim has been voted 2002 best text editor by the Linux Journal. Vim remains very popular to this day.
• DateBk was the 2003 winner of the best productivity application.