Microsoft's license was soft, and depending on the customer buying enough paper to cover, if you could even find a reseller that could describe how to properly license Windows Server (exteremely doubtful).
OOTH, Novell's licensing was a hard limit. Once that # of workstations logged in, those without a license were hosed.
On all the jobs I did in those days, Novell networks at each customer site _never_ had enough licenses to cover every workstation. There was always somebody left out and they had to go bug people to see if they were done with the network so they could get in their tasks. Nobody ever seemed to overprovision their licenses to cover every single workstation (or even to have extra).
I never met a company using Microsoft server that properly had their CALs licensed, and they didn't want to hear it from me. Finding somebody to sell you the proper CALs was an interesting exercise.
Most other network server OSes at the time (the Unix vendors were trying hard in this space in those early days too) also had hard licenses. Which was part of why they didn't gain traction at all.