I believe corporate red tape one of reasons to not-pay for a software licence.
If you download the trial or non commercial edition, works for you, you would never go through chain of approvals to buy a cheap software.Meare player is an example that you can think of.
Araxis merge, Visual studio, Visio are some to name a few.
This is the reason I don't even try it. I would never be able to get my company to pay for a software that's not in our catalog, regardless of the price.
I don't really buy into the software licensing bs--it was forced on us without any choices. It is the worst kind of legal bs there is. "You paid for this but you have no rights to it." Uh, yeah, keep thinking that.
A lot of them use a phone home/license key model... so it will stop working if you don't pay for the license. Where they don't, ya it's basically a trust system and most big companies would rather just pay the license fee than expose the legal risk of using software illegally.
It's not the financial cost, it's the non-financial cost.
It's not just the price. It's the lock-in and the rules after you pay for it.
I can't tell you the amount of times I have advocated the purchase of software, at companies I have worked for in the past, just to get it and be restricted and severely regretting recommending the purchase in the first place.
My experience is that companies generally have the intention of playing fair and paying for all the licenses they need, but without any license protection enforcing it, nobody is going to keep an eye on how many people are actually using the software within the organisation.
I'd never even consider paying for an IDE I need for work. Why would a company not buy me software that has a direct and immediate impact on my productivity? Huge red flag.
For me, it's due to the terrible process everywhere I've worked for getting approval to buy anything. In some cases, it's even against company policy to pay for a tool out of my own pocket. One product I needed was $10 but the person who was put in charge of all software purchasing decided to try to negotiate a site license with the vendor for a lower price and only for each seat used. She was basically trying to haggle over $10, on the off chance at some point in the future more people would want to use the tool and then the company could pay $8 or some other amount less than $10 per seat. It took months and the involvement of my manager, his manager, and a C level executive to get the $10 purchase approval to go through. I would have paid the $10 myself but that was a "zero tolerance" fireable offense.
I get why companies are concerned about having improperly licensed software on their machines, as the consequences can be great, but too many have gone too far in the opposite direction, making purchasing anything a long and convoluted process.
Too late to add this edit: now that I've thought about it for a bit, I think that many of our software purchases are via software resellers. One of the main reasons is that getting a new vendor approved by Accounting for payments is a slow, painful (to us) process that involves Legal (contracts!). As I'm neither an accountant nor a lawyer, I'm willing to accept that they have good reasons for their processes (preventing me from easily funneling money to a relative, for example) and just see it as another fact of corporate life instead of railing against it. In return, they do us the courtesy of accepting that they can't just install whatever they like on their PCs.
Legal is often still involved when it comes to new software products, because, among other things, there's GDPR. Oh, and Works Council.
My main point remains unchanged: relying on tens of thousands of end users to manage their licenses is something that large enterprises just can't do, so we end up with rules that seem draconian, and you, the hopeful seller of software/services to be used in corporate environments, will benefit from understanding how we work, even if you think it's stupid.
In other words: you don't want to pay for extra licenses.
Are there software packages which, in addition to wanting per-machine licenses, also make it an unbelievable pain to manage those licenses? Yes. But that's not what happened in this story.
Because that's the deal they made with you when they started using it. "You may use this software free of charge for non-commercial uses. Commercial use is allowed under our [Commercial Use Agreement][0]", etc. etc.
You're selling software to companies with legal departments for an amount that, frankly, isn't worth the hassle of trying to scam you out of at the risk of you suing them. Companies really do pay for software based only on the software company asking them to do so.
I don't disagree with that. My point is that historically, it's been their choice and as a result it's been mostly their loss. When there is will to use the software, but they refuse to take the time to understand the licensing or dismiss it as not being simple enough, the other corporate entities behind it will gladly overcharge them for some kind of proprietary license or legal consultancy scheme.
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