Not exactly. Keep in mind the people using the products in a large enterprise are not, generally, the people who have to pay for it. If you break these two peop

Not exactly. Keep in mind the people using the products in a large enterprise are not, generally, the people who have to pay for it. If you break these two people into their respective, high level, org groups it will generally be: procurement and engineering. IMO it's not that the engineering group is trying to not be trustworthy. It's that they have a job to do and IBM knows that this is their goal. So if we let engineering do their job, uninhibited, then there's a high chance that if the product is useful to do that they'll keep expanding it's reach internally (land and expand). This is just a slightly different spin on how the vendor allows the end user client to use their product. It's very likely the agreement between IBM and the enterprise client clearly spells this out. However, since the client is bound to pay for overages in arrears they are now at the mercy of not having as much leverage in price negotiations. A smart customer will predefine usage level bands as it pertains to discounts. For example if we're using 10k seats of RHEL we get 10% off list, 20k seats @ 20%, etc. The disconnect is that procurement is likely disconnected from engineering for the better part between audits and they're not well prepared to have the after-the-fact negotiation to true up licensing. IBM, and others, bank on this by selling the value the customer is receiving from said products in use. The disconnect here is that had IBM enforced hard license limits the organization may say that the product is too expensive and look for an alternative because the customer is forced to buy more licensing mid-budget cycle. It's harder to rip out or change 20k installations of RHEL than it is 10k. Vendors know this and leverage this consequence of using this approach to keep the customer on the ball and chain. So we have an enterprise that doesn't plan or communicate with itself very well and a vendor who puts out the all you can eat buffet to the hungry engineers. It's not technically wrong, and if an enterprise gets burned by it technically it's their own fault. Is it by design? For sure and my guess is that this type of model pays dividends all while being on the up and up.