If they could afford the server hardware and datacenters to house them in and the fat, fat paychecks they were giving their employees, they could afford the sof

If they could afford the server hardware and datacenters to house them in and the fat, fat paychecks they were giving their employees, they could afford the software licenses. Everyone here acts as if no capital equipment intensive businesses, like Tesla or SpaceX/Blue Origin, ever manages to get off the ground. Had Linux, GCC, etc. not existed, Sun Microsystems or whoever would have charged whatever the market would bear without strangling it with Microsoft + Intel trying to undercut them on price/performance to keep them honest. For most software businesses trying to get off the ground, software licensing costs would have been a significant budget item but not overwhelmingly so. [EDIT] That's already the case today for per-employee software costs like Windows + MS Office and the zillion SaaSes (Slack, Okta, etc.) that most businesses use.