> Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) ‘complicated’.
Some of this, too, is due to Cisco’s longevity in the market, the sheer number of product lines they’ve gone through, and the number of companies they’ve absorbed.
You buy a company, you can’t just cancel all the existing licenses for those products, so you have to keep those licensing systems and pricing packages around for those customers that keep renewing year after year. Only after a while, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth to integrate those into your existing licensing packages (especially if you’re figuring you’ll get around to EoLing that stuff when no one’s using it anymore), so they just stick around forever.
You kill off a product line and replace it with something, existing customers say, “Great, I’ll buy the new thing with the options I had on the old one”. Except those don’t map cleanly, so now you’re developing odd licensing packages for people who want the Super-Duper Routing 9000 but only with the same leather trim and manual shifter they had on the Routing 8000. If the customer is large enough you’ll bend for them, especially the big national ones with clauses in their contracts that require the forfeiture of dragon-blanching amounts of gold if you ever can’t sell them exactly what they bought last year.