> software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price In my experience, it's more laziness in the face

> software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price In my experience, it's more laziness in the face of dependency hell. You integrate N big projects with different dependencies, hacked-together CMake modules with hard-coded paths and other mistakes, by copy-pasting several installs full of DLLs with different versions, and you end up with 10x the size you could have had. Or you can spend weeks on making a common build system with shared deps, and ship nothing of value in the meantime. Guess which one I'd rather show my manager. > awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!) For a workstation and an honest user maybe, but if you don't limit CPU cores, a user could simply deploy your software on a huge compute server and make it available to N users. Price per CPU makes sense in that case.