As professional NLE software users, we’ve been conditioned to the 18 month release cycle, wherein we dole out our hard-earned cash about every year and a half for a new version of the software we already use, with a new number attached (i.e. version 6 becomes version 7, etc).
In the meantime we’ve come to expect that any version of the software that includes our original version number (say 6.3. 6.6 etc), should be ours to download for free. On the whole this is because successive versions are generally bug-fixes that fix problems that should not have been there in the first place, that they released anyway. They modify our ire at purchasing buggy or broken software, by making the fixes downloadable for free. It’s an assumption that’s now built into the customer-software vendor relationship.
This somewhat masochistic policy of buying known buggy software and hoping that the company eventually fixes most of the major issues, was the price we paid for the rapidly developing technical capabilities of our software and hardware. While the software was buggy, it made up for it in additional productivity features that our old version and old hardware just couldn’t handle.