if GP works in aerospace, those are very likely per-seat license costs.

Completely out of curiousity -- what software costs $35k per seat per year??

VxWorks is about that I believe. When you reach these kinds of price tags though it's hard to evaluate them on a per seat basis, because they tend to come with built-in consultants, etc.

CryEngine 3 is notoriously $1.2 million, but I believe that's a "total cost" rather than a per seat style license.

Lots of engineering software does. FPGA toolchains, CAD, simulation. Not uncommon.

Having worked in several related areas, but not very recently, the costs for specialist software packages were certainly much higher than people think of for basic office software, but nowhere near the scale we're talking about here. Have things truly become so crazy that five-figure annual fees for these packages are the norm? A permanent licence used to cost less per user than that! But then I suppose this is the point the article is making.

Several years ago my university was bragging about a $200 million donation the engineering school had received from several companies.

Turned out it was just several hundred seat licenses for a bunch of commercial cad, simulation etc. software, which the companies valued at about $50k/seat.

A very cheap way to donate $200 million.

And to write-off $200.00 million.

it is. And especially for SMBs, the cost was way less in the past. Imagine a small mechanical engineering company: 10 years ago they'd have 5 seats of a 5 year old AutoCAD/ProEngineer/Solidworks version, sneakily locking them in but basically no recurring costs. If a new customer needed a new version, they bought one seat for that and kept the old ones, gradually upgrading. Nowadays they pay half the single-seat cost per year because of "continouus updates" (for the UI mainly, so that they can sell trainings)

I heard about 20k per seat for CATIA at a previous employer. 35k wouldn't surprise me if you start adding add-ons (simulation, PDM, etc).

Enterprise optimization software costs that. Cplex, gurobi, Xpress.

That is per seat license.