My company buys a math library. It's normally licensed per-core, annually, with a license key that expires and makes it stop working. We eventually worked out

My company buys a math library. It's normally licensed per-core, annually, with a license key that expires and makes it stop working. We eventually worked out a special deal where we would pay for 2 years at a time in advance, and get a version without the stupid expiring key. The library vendor trusts us to account for the number of CPUs we are running it on and self-report. We don't abuse that trust. The alternatives are: 1. Writing our own math library. We estimated it would take a man-month to get it usable, but we might spend years in corner cases. 2. Paying someone to improve Octave. Probably similar to case 1, but we would feel good about our contribution. 3. Very expensive alternatives.