The real game starts when people run infinite while/for loops that try to check out one as soon as it's available. Or run useless operations within the licensed software just so that that the license doesn't expire and return to the pool. I'm guilty of both, sadly. In an academic environment, additional resources aren't going to fall from the sky.

ouch I can't stop thinking now about how much cost gets imposed on the economy by habits like this established in higher education - I built my original business with very few formally qualified people who included a large proportion of the most experienced and professionally qualified individuals including several with multinational boardroom careers in F500s. we didn't have the culture to tolerate games like holding up a floating licence (of which licence a lot of critical software used) and we weren't the generation raised with computers by a few distant, but hearing this both makes perfect sense that it might be prevalent and simultaneously is thoroughly unnerving me about how strongly I might react on encountering the same if my present venture gets going.

I guess that's the reason Qlik (a business intelligence software provider) started using licensing by the minute - yes, like a phone call.