Ask HN: Why is it so difficult to buy academic software outside of a college?

I don't just mean "expensive", I mean, "how many #$%@ing hoops do I have to jump through even for a commercial license?" So, I have a project I just won a bid on which requires some pretty heavy number crunching. I'm going to do the prototyping in R, which I know like the back of my hand, but I need a more popular language to hand it back to the client in. They've said they'll accept Wolfram, Matlab, or Maple. Fair enough. I used all of those in grad school, and I more or less know their strengths and weaknesses, and really any of them would be fine for the job at hand (as would R, as would Octave, as would...) Here's the thing. I simply want, as an individual, to buy a license for normally-academic software to use commercially, and it's a frigging nightmare. No, I don't want to leave you my number so you can call me later. No, I don't want to find a local re-seller. I want to state my license needs, buy a license, and use the software as advertised. (I admit I'm kind of in a weird position because I'm a US citizen living in India, so web stores assume I need Indian licenses but my visa precludes me from buying them. Still: this shouldn't be this hard, should it?) I ended up going with Wolfram because they actually just let me buy a commercial license. An expensive one, but this contract makes up for it and I'm sure I can drum up another one in the next two years. But this really is stupid. Is the "contact for pricing" really just a "how much money can we squeeze from you?" thing?