The Tyranny of corporate licences

I often hear enterprise architects say "we can use product X as it is free", as I know X is actually quite pricey I ask "wow, XYZ is giving you X for free?" To which they reply "No, we have a corporate license and that comes out of someone elses budget" So this is a special kind of free which I'd not come across before, one that actually means "free, as in we don't care about the cost to the company as a whole". This sort of individualism is revealed as doubly corrosive when you talk to the developers who find product X is way more complex than they need and actually increases development costs by requiring specialist skills and damaging developer productivity. This disconnect between people who actually have to use software and those who make the purchasing decisions is not at all unusual. The fact there is a corporate licenses leads to some nasty behaviors as well, it is argued that the software is "free" when someone raises cost as an objection and it is argued as "highly expensive" when someone questions how much value it really adds (i.e. an erroneous equation of expensive and high ROI). The other things that gets thrown into the mix is standards - I just ask people go and look if the standards are being driven and defined by companies that make big complex enterprise software products. They can then draw their conclusion on how much value those particular standards have and whether they truly help avoid lock in. All of these things allow an easy defense for those purchasers who failed to exercise due diligence in their decision and create a a situation that is almost impossible for the people who have to use those products day-to-day to challenge. I suggest projects that use a license pay a proportion of its costs and any loss (or gain) the developers see is carefully tracked. Before you comment you may want to check that your friendly enterprise software vendor hasn't placed you under a gagging order, no really, I'm not joking.