License cost tend to be negligeable compared to the cost of devs, dbas,sysadmins, etc, that's true. But at the same time, it's a can be a huge speed bump in te

License cost tend to be negligeable compared to the cost of devs, dbas,sysadmins, etc, that's true. But at the same time, it's a can be a huge speed bump in term of procurement. Waiting several weeks for accounting to accept the procurement of a license can really damage business or development speed. It also adds significant admin load to track the license pool correctly and can represent a legal risk when inevitably, someone starts exceeding the terms of license (db size or db clones, or increase in hardware).