I am not a programmer, I have little to none of the knowledge with regards to software laws but I do understand the concept of ethical practices and moral usage of a program. I'm just another user who prefers uncluttered directories and wants to spare myself of the time-consuming re-installation in case my OS decides to die. I actually don't carry around a flash disk full of apps and haven't had an opportunity to try that. I simply use my portables on my main PC for the simple reason that I know where to find them. It's bad enough that in Windows 7 64-bit, programs saves stuffs in Program Files, ProgramData, then there's My Documents, Username\AppData\Roaming, Username\AppData\Local, etc. From what I've read, "portable-ization" is how it was done before until Microsoft invented the registry (I think I was not yet existing during that era). I'm not going to antagonize Microsoft for that. To be fair, the registry have probably eliminated me from murdering my PC if I can easily tinker with system settings and I can sometimes be too jerky to see the red signs. Anyway, I am grateful that today, "portable-ization" is not just a niche, but a really strong alternative to run programs. And that's due to communities like this and to developers/teams like PA and WPP.
So using a simple process of elimination, here's where I stand:
i) If a program offers a portable version, that's what I'd prefer. But if their portable version saves files to folders other than its own, then I'd go looking for something that's wrapped.
ii) I don't like Liberkey's offering. Having to rely on their launcher to run program installers with weird extension is restricting to users and somewhat alienating that it practically suggests that I try something else. That's just me. To each his own.
iii) Between PA and WPP, I choose which ever is up to date. If both are up to date, I test both. The one that occupies less disk space stays. But if it proves to be wonky, I switch to the other one. No preferences here. I sometimes even mix them up. I use PA's Photoshop layout for GIMP with WPP's GIMP.
iv) I don't use their launchers though. I don't even follow their naming convention (PA's AppNamePortable or WPP's X-AppName). I sometimes update my portables manually. Especially with multi-platform programs. There are great programs written for Linux but the portable version of the Windows port is not always available, so I do the extraction method and copy them inside the portable's version.
v) I have no idea about Cameyo's status from the legal perspective. I think it's a legit app that's used illegally. I haven't encountered anything that's portable-ized by Cameyo, though.
vi) ThinInstall is mainly used by pirates. There are legit freewares that's been portable-ized by ThinInstall (i.e. those pre-XP legacy apps). But it really takes too long to startup, showing signs of its compatibility limits.
vii) Here's the part where I laugh at myself for being just plain silly: jauntPE has been mentioned a couple of times here but I haven't any idea that it was used for portable-ization. Like I said, I'm not a programmer, so when I asked about jauntPE before, I was directed to a page but I closed it immediately after reading a few sentences. It's not that I find it boring, it's just too challenging to take in for someone who's simply asking and has suddenly lost sense of why he clicked on that link in the first place.
Now I'll definitely check it out.viii) If there's something i want portable-ized, I think it would be a virtual Windows OS. You put it in a flash drive, boot, run programs and shut it down inside a machine with a different OS. It's a bonus if it can also run on other OS and on mobile platforms. Sort of like a portable system that borrows from Cloud technology to be utilized offline. But the complications to make something like this happen is huge and the limits are still lurking. So that's just me being silly again. ;p
