Seat-based licensing allows enterprise software companies to value-price; they can sell to a 50 person law firm for a low amount, without giving away the store to a 5000 person enterprise. The alternatives are to forgo the smaller companies and market exclusively to BigCo's, or to leave huge amounts of money on the table.<p>This person's problem isn't with seat-based licensing. It's with license enforcement. No license enforcement scheme is good. They all suck, no matter how simple the pricing model.<p>A reasonable response to this complaint is, maintain seat-based pricing, but don't do "hard" enforcement; just alert the product admin that they need to update their licensing, and make it extremely easy for them to do that. Have a maintenance and support process that checkpoints licensing compliance, so that customers can run the product indefinitely without complying, but will be forced to confront licensing when they call for support or try to upgrade the software.