Yea this is the way a lot of enterprise software has been sold for decades... especially useful if there's a cost to the software company for delivering upgrade

Yea this is the way a lot of enterprise software has been sold for decades... especially useful if there's a cost to the software company for delivering upgrades (e.g. shipping CDs and installing it), you only have to support for 12 months and after that you're off the hook, if the client doesn't pay up.