If you think that's bad, you can get Microsoft Certified Professional certified on licensing. On at least 3 separate exams. I am certified on licensing.

Commercial software licensing has always been a PITA, especially at the enterprise level. I just thank sweet baby Jesus every day I don't have to deal with IBM or Oracle.

There must be a chart somewhere that shows customer lifetime value vs. churn vs. licensing complexity.

At some low number of customers, the more complex you make your licensing, the fewer people buy and the fewer people renew, and since piracy is roughly zero anyway, you make your licensing simple.

Then something magical happens somewhere in the middle, where either piracy becomes scarier or your customers are more locked into your ecosystem. Then the more complex you make your licensing, for some reason the more profit you can get out of your customers. It must be this way, otherwise we'd have no way to account for MS/Oracle/IBM.

I wonder where the crossover points on the chart are.

* How much piracy do you take before you make your licensing a nightmare?

* How "enterprise" do you have to go before you stop worrying that making your software a massive pain to install and upgrade won't bleed your customers away?