The problem with Image Salsa and Movie Salsa is that there is no longer any support or hope that there ever will be any new releases of these products. The developer has totally abandoned the products. Thus, the reason they are now being offered as FREE downloads.
However, having said that, the products still perform quite nicely. I have used them for many years and do not have any issues with them other than the fact that I have never been able to get V2.x to run on my systems. I wanted to move to v2.x because it supposedly supported at least 2 webcams simultaneously. Since v2.x wouldn't even run on my system I was never able to confirm that claim. The developer tried to help me on this issue but then I got lost in his abandonment of the product. Both products worked fine with a single webcam and I rarely ever ran into problems with either of them.
The beauty of Image Salsa was that it allowed a user to overlay VWS based data elements directly onto the image being produced. It also has a streaming capability. Movie Salsa gives you the ability to produce a movie file of the time-lapsed photos and overlay data with lots of options.
However, as a result of the non-support of the product and inability to get v2.x to run, I have essentially abandoned both products.