I won't bother arguing with the received dogma of neo-classic economics and accept your premise that: that businesses strive to maximize profits, and that they

I won't bother arguing with the received dogma of neo-classic economics and accept your premise that: that businesses strive to maximize profits, and that they should do so. That wasn't my point. My point is that microsoft maximizes profits by making licensing so complicated that a significant percentage of their customer base over-pay for licensing rather than take the risk of being under-licensed. Since you took the path of least resistance, you may have overpaid for licensing. If your goal, as a business, is to maximize profits, well, then, you've worked against your long-term goal. It may be that the cost of overpaying microsoft for licenses was cheaper than the opportunity cost of figuring out how to pay less for licenses. Which brings me back to my main point, it is no disgrace, as an engineer, to decide that Microsoft licensing is a problem better avoided.