I'm a big fan of Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog. I read a gem of a post by him here which basically stated that some small vendors make really really good software. And I do believe we have ample proof of this. Jeff suggests that we should support these kind of vendors, primarily by buying/donating to the software if you really use it a lot. Like for example giving a little money to an open source project which you use extensively.

I read the post completely and agreed with the point he was making there. And for my bit, I bought EditPlus - a really useful text editor on the Windows platform, and PowerArchiver - a very full featured and cheap (only 20$) compression utility. So if anyone has any extra dough to throw out, consider supporting the little guy who makes great software that you use all the time.