Well, I _thought_ it was. Obviously I’m wrong.

Recently I’ve delt with too many US companies who are not interested in extending the same conditions or offers to those residing outside its polluted shores. Let me go through some of them:

h3. Macromedia

Most people who visit the “UK website”:http://www.macromedia.com/uk will sooner or later click on a link that takes them to the US website instead. And once there, you find out that non-profit institutions are eligible for discounts on their products in the US. Try finding that on the UK site. I was looking at “Macromedia Contribute”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/ (there is no page for it on the UK site) for a not-for-profit I am building a site for, and they do not want to spend £69 for it. A reduced price, equivilent to the US non-profit Contribute price of $79 might have been persuadable.

h3. “CityDesk”:http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk by “Fogcreek”:http://www.fogcreek.com/

I’d heard this bandied around as a competitor of Contribute, so thought I’d try it. I was impressed enough to enquire about the price of the new Contributor Edition, to allow clients to edit the site’s contents without being able to change the templates etc. When I emailed, no prices had been decided, but on questioning it turned out that there would be a reduced price for not-for-profit organisations.

However, yet again this was US only. From an email I exchanged with them:

bq. The 50% discount is not available to religious or political organizations. It is only available to nonprofits with 501(c)3. The organization can be based outside the US, but must have that status in the US.

bq. For Universities that are accredited in the US, the home Edition can currently be bought for $39 and the Professional for $99 currently.

And when I questioned why this was the case:

bq. That’s Fog Creek’s policy. Your question seems rhetorical, so I don’t really have an answer for it.

Fine. I didn’t buy the full edition of CityDesk for future use with clients. This was also influenced by problems with the XHTML it produces - it validates, but doesn’t encourage good structural usage. However, I could live with this, as it provides a useful tool.

h3. PayPal

Despite having a strong US bias, they’ve been getting much better recently (multiple currencies was a great move). However, they’ve now changed the Terms and Conditions to stop businesses outside the US and Canada having listings in their Shops section. Existing businesses with listings keep theirs, but have to get Customer Services to edit it.

h3. Conclusion

I am guessing that this is being done because these companies want to check that the non-profit groups are what they say they are. My advice would be to _truse_ people instead. Yes, you will lose a few full-price sales, but the gain in goodwill will more than make up for it. My opinion of Macromedia reached new lows after I bought Studio MX (Dreamweaver has great CSS support - Yeh right, what b*****ks; And no inclusive upgrade to Freehand _MX_???) but the discrimination against non-profits outside the US has driven it even lower.

FogCreek - well I didn’t have an opinion of before, but what I do have now is likewise low. And is not helped by the fact that CityDesk 2 (”Produces valid XHTML!!!”) doesn’t have a way in the visual editor of entering headings (@

,

@ etc) - instead you have to use @…@. OK, so that’s valid XHTML transitional, but not in spirit, only by letter.

I am using CityDesk (free edition) for the Chaplaincy site at University, as it’s the best tool I’ve found. But I think an open source tool of similar calibre would be very nice. Thoughts on that coming soon!