Licenses costs are generally quite low compared to the overall price of a project, that's true. But licenses can also be a bit of a nightmare to manage. I've s

Licenses costs are generally quite low compared to the overall price of a project, that's true. But licenses can also be a bit of a nightmare to manage. I've seen many cases where licenses were violated due to needs for testing/development environments. It can be difficult go through the purchase process in big companies, specially if the software in question is not wildly used. Handling licenses can also be hard technically, when your licenses are tied to hardware (a MAC address for example) or configuration (hostname or IP). When migrating some legacy hosts to VMs, I had numerous headaches when dealing with flexlm servers. It can also be really annoying when you don't have perpetual licences and the editor goes down or is not able to generate a new licence for the (obsolete) version you are using. Basically, you must add specific processes and even additional infrastructure (inventory, CMDBs) just to manage it. It can also slow down development. I understand that in many fields, no viable OSS alternatives exist, or even could exist, specially for specialised software. But if I can avoid proprietary, I generally do. I'm not against paying for software, but other for of payments, like a support contract, are generally far less annoying.