I feel your pain. I'd like to offer another perspective, too.
I use MS Windows. Microsoft invests considerable time/energy/money to ensure the highest degree of compatibility with apps when upgrading to a new version of MS Windows.
I don't use Linux/etc, but from what I see in various forums on the internet, Linux doesn't invest as much in ensuring compatibility when upgrading. As someone who works in the software industry, I would be pretty upset if a careless OS change broke my product for my customers. I would try to solve the problem as part of normal support, but I would also have to consider my own costs in doing so -- for example if an old version got broken, I'm not sure that I would invest to keep updating old versions to work with various careless OS breakages over the years. That's a potentially steep tax to eat as a business, just like it's a steep tax for customers to eat going in the other direction -- it's an ecosystem problem inherent to the OS. In order for a software ecosystem to work well, all parties involved must have equally high standards of compatibility -- when the OS itself doesn't, it harms the whole ecosystem, not just individual customers or businesses.
I'm pretty happy with SlickEdit. I've had my share of problems, and reported them to the SE team to help both the SE company and my fellow customers. Overall it continues to be one of the best experiences I've had with any company. But, I do keep up my yearly subscription because to me it's worth $60/year to keep up to date with features, performance improvements, redesigns, and so on. I recognize that bulk licensing could expand the maintenance contract cost pretty quickly, but I have no experience there. Also, I accept that SE supports a lot of stuff I don't care about, and that investing in all those things attenuates the investment in the areas I do care about -- because overall for me it's a great piece of software that's extremely valuable for my daily efforts.
Just my $0.02.
