I am having some trouble multi-quoting on my iPad but I was editing my post to include more information about European directives when Erine and butterflyeyes replied. Anyway it might not be as bad a thing as you think for indie companies to get bought up by a larger company... Sure it makes them more "commercial" and less indie, but on the other hand,they get access to more resources that they would never have been able to afford and can therefore push out more innovative products. In large companies, research is shared across the board and not confined to a single brand. Often, indie brands do not really have much technology to speak of, but with access to new research, truly innovative products can be put out. Of course I am looking at this from a researcher's standpoint, so I understand that for some, there is the nostalgia associated with supporting small independent companies, but maybe thanks to the distributing power to larger parent companies and their marketing budgets, these indie companies can reach a larger audience elsewhere. If a parent company is self-aware, which I thinking pretty much the case now for many conglomerates, they would actually be smart to preserve the soul and original selling point of the company that they just acquired so as to preserve its fan base, while spreading its name further to attract more like-minded people. It makes no sense from the business point of view to acquire an indie brand and rebrand it to make it a commercial brand because it is not like they are lacking any of those.
