It seems to depend on the application/software developer. Just about everything serious I've worked with in recent years defaults to needing some sort of phone-home activation in the first instance. Some certainly have alternative options, usually at a significant but not off-the-chart price premium, to have a floating licence server on your own network so you can have up to N machines running at once but it doesn't have to be the same N all the time. And of course various brands are trying to push some popular software suites towards a full-on subscription model anyway: Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite come to mind.

Unfortunately, my businesses currently fall into an awkward middle ground, shared by many start-ups and probably freelancers/contractors/small agencies as well, where you're not really into volume licensing or floating licence server territory, but you still rely on heavyweight professional software to get things done. Basically, we have none of the protections of a consumer because we're operating as a business, but we also lack the natural bargaining power and the in-house legal department a larger business would have.

Sadly, despite recommendations even from a formal review within the legal profession, neither our previous government nor the current one seem keen on fixing this. That leaves many of us in a permanent position of vulnerability to these kinds of Internet-based DRM schemes, where the failure of a key software supplier could quite literally bring down our entire company overnight, even though we have already completely paid for all the software we need. And yes, as a business owner, that does scare the $#!% out of me.