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Microsoft’s “request for external license” form is one page long, and has a “how much would this company cost to acquire” section. Or so I’ve heard.

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While at Microsoft, a project I was on was acquiring a license for a library and just to be sure of everything, instead of the standard "usage for this product" license, MS acquired a lifetime license to do whatever we wanted with the library.

Anyway tl;dr their lead engineer flew out and helped us get everything up and running. :-D

We sold our technology to IBM back in the day (EJB era) and the deal involved a "break glass" option where they could pay a pre-agreed fee at any time if they ever needed the ability to modify our source code.

Seems like a bad idea from an anchoring perspective.

People buy $20 socks with a $300 suit because $20 seems inconsequential compared to the suit.

What's $90/mo compared to $50M to acquire them :-P

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