publisher

The entity responsible for the creation and publication of software. Examples include Adobe and Microsoft. Companies that sell hardware may also be software publishers, such as IBM.

Mergers and acquisitions in the software publishing market mean that one application may have different publishers at different times in its history. For example, the Dreamweaver application was originally published by Macromedia (prior to version 8), but that company was acquired by Adobe. Since version 8, the publisher for Dreamweaver is correctly recorded as Adobe.