Software Licensing: Advantages over retail software

By purchasing software licenses rather than retail software, a company, or institution is able to legally have the rights to use software without having to pay the full retail price for the software package. Although it seems that companies selling/distributing software licenses are reluctant to have the actual cost of individual licenses on their web pages, I was able to contact Melvyn Myers, of Advance Software Group (http://www.advancesoftware.com.au), an Australian …

…at http://www.linux.org. If financially feasible, I would recommend that any company use non-free software and licenses for multimedia development or otherwise, except in the case where open source software is used and altered within the organisation to add functionality or alter it for specific needs. This is mostly due to the support available when software is purchased. Such support would be hard to find for software distributed under any form of GPL.