IBM Lotus Symphony is no doubt a well known, popular, award winning, spreadsheet application. It was one of the first spreadsheet software products to be available on the market, offering basic office applications including word processing, envelopes, PowerPoint presentation, and various other common office tasks. However, unlike many of its competitors, this no longer comes free with your IBM-PC. While it was a popular product, IBM has finally discontinued it in order to focus on more current software. At the time of this writing, you can still download the software from IBM's website, but it will cost you - as always - a fee for downloading.
One might think that since IBM developed such an acclaimed, well know, and heavily used spreadsheet application, they would charge for the software and thereby recoup their expenses and make a little profit along the way. This would seem to suggest that the company would then be able to develop more free applications that would compete with their other products - and it would be a noble and justifiable pursuit of such a goal. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that at all. Instead, the company makes its money by selling those expensive software licenses to those who want them. And we know how greedy manufacturers can get.
Now, you may not think that it's unethical to download the software for free, but in fact it is. You see, IBM gets paid a lot of money by the people who use their software. If the applications were truly free, IBM would never make any money from those applications. And so they make sure that those people who download their software to get what they're paying for: all of the software in a single package. Of course, the software also includes a lot of other files, which make the software even larger in size. It's not that the company doesn't make any money off of the download fees, because it does: it's that they have a way of making more money off of the size of the download itself.
