In practice this isn’t a problem. Take a non-software example:

Driving instructors typically have their cars on a 3 year hire purchase then return instead of buying. Why? Way back when, my driving instructor actually bought one of the cars. 3 months later, the engine failed and it was out of warranty.

Because of that, he realised that paying a monthly fee meant he had no surprise failures, he returned the car just as the clutch was burning out (learner drivers don’t have great driving technique, weirdly enough), and had a fresh car every 3 years for new learners.

Makes sense, but FWIW and IIRC, the terms of an ordinary car lease prohibit commercial use.

I don’t know the details but I’m assuming he’s using commercial lease hiring, or the U.K. rules are different. The mileage and wear and tear alone would mean he’d be unable to hide it.

If it's for business use you should be able to expense it.

If it’s for your own business who do you send the receipt to?

The government

Yeah I've never heard anyone think a driving instructor car was a great buy, unless you like replacing basically every driving component which can fail. These cars have it rough. Especially manual. I'm surprised a driving instructor (of all people) would think of doing that without also wanting to do a full engine and transmission rebuild.

He told me his reasons but he put it down as an expensive lesson learnt.

I don't think rental covers any and all failures.

It’s not a rental, it’s hire purchase with a warranty, so the most common things that are going to fail are covered. Other things are just not that likely to fail in the first 3 years.

Shows how long I've been around. I still think of commercial software as something you buy and own.

If you can't resell it, you don't own it. Do you have examples of commercial software that you were allowed to resell?

There used to be a pretty big business in US of reselling expensive software licenses (think AutoCad etc). I remember Autodesk trying to stop it and not being able to which brings us to the current day.

Of course now that everything is under pay as you go SaaS model, that's out of window.

Still in Europe it is legal (http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=124...) and people do resell mundane licenses such as Windows.

Pretty much everything was resellable in Europe at least. Used computer games especially were a fairly big thing.