Nikon RAW... proprietary, locked? What's the deal?

Every time Nikon changes their RAW files some programmer at Adobe has to figure out what needs to be changed, and then make all the changes from the guts in the RAW interpreter all the way to the GUI's display of the camera name, resolutions, and so forth.

And - just trust me on this - that programmer wants to be paid.

There's also the cost of the test engineer who verifies the modifications work and don't break anything else, and the cost of Internet bandwidth for customer downloads.

These are the bare minimum expenses - in the real world there's more. But this shows the reality that it's not free to continue to support new camera RAW files.