It's less a trick, than a sad reality for certain types of software. I'm sure there are others, but for Oracle, for example, currently they require you to have

It's less a trick, than a sad reality for certain types of software. I'm sure there are others, but for Oracle, for example, currently they require you to have a perpetual license for every core that's running inside your Amazon VM, which makes the pricing crazy. I'm sure Oracle said, "Hey, either price it like this, or you can price it based on the underlying hardware, which is how we do it with VMware". So at least now it might be feasible for enterprises to run some of these traditionally licensed software packages without either an all you can eat license or blatantly violating the rules.