This is absolutely true - currently enterprise licensing is often (almost always) braindead. I've often been forced to put in a new J2EE cluster (for example),

This is absolutely true - currently enterprise licensing is often (almost always) braindead. I've often been forced to put in a new J2EE cluster (for example), because licenses are CPU based -- if the license is expensive it doesn't add up to run at 10% utility on a large, shared cluster. To get bang-for-license-buck you're forced to run on only dedicated hardware. Really annoying because it destroys economies of scale - you have all this bity infrastructure. Not only is this a pain to maintain, but it also means that you generally end up with more infrastructure, and use more energy, can't virtualize, etc, etc.