Software makes the world go round, and more often than not you have to pay a pretty penny for the biggest and most popular software packages. Which is more than a little ironic when you consider that just about any software you pay for today is built at least partly on the work of free and open source developers.

Leading software development company Codehesion has identified a major industry shift where companies are moving from using off-the-shelf SaaS subscriptions, to building their own custom software.

“Businesses outgrow SaaS when software stops being a tool they use and becomes the engine their business runs on,” said Codehesion founder and CEO Hector Beyers.

“At that point, customer software isn’t a cost – it’s a competitive advantage. You’re building something your competitors can’t buy off the shelf.”

AI’s ability to accelerate delivery timelines has made the case for going custom even stronger.

“With the right partner, you get purpose-built technology at a speed that would have been unthinkable even a year ago,” said Beyers.

Many a seasoned tech attorney may have thought it was an April Fools’ joke the first time they read an open source license. The antithesis of commercial software licenses, open source turned familiar terms on their heads. Those days are long past, and the industry officially “gets” open source licenses. But there are licenses and then there are licenses. And while they aren’t frequently used, some that show up in the wild (and in Black Duck audits) are pretty outlandish.

Thousands of licenses covering millions of components can be found in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. The top 20 licenses—the MIT, Apache, GPL licenses, etc. ones you’ve heard of—cover 98-ish% of the software out there. But there is a “long tail” of licenses that tapers down to one-offs. Many reflect the quirks of quirky software developer copyright holders exercising their rights to put whatever terms they want on their intellectual property, generally to the chagrin of IP attorneys and open source advocates who value standardisation over amateur creativity.

The long tail comprises mostly mundane variations on the standard themes, but some of the resultant licenses are pretty kooky, well beyond the Beerware License that is perhaps the best-known of this ilk.

The following is a comprehensive list of unusual licenses, all suitable reading for the occasion. These oddball licenses fall into a few themes and are grouped as such.

Microsoft has confirmed that it will be launching the Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Worker Suite on May 1. The package consists of Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Agent 365. It is the biggest release since Microsoft 365 E5, which came out in 2015. The new suite will cost $99 per user per month.

Microsoft 365 E5 is currently the most comprehensive option offered by the tech giant. It includes all the familiar Office tools, advanced security tools, and Power BI Pro. Microsoft 365 E7 will further expand the package by including Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365. The latter has been available on a limited basis until now but will become generally available at the same time as the new license.

Microsoft 365 E7 will be further enhanced with Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced security features from Defender, Intune, and Purview. According to Microsoft, paid use of Copilot has grown by more than 160 percent year-on-year, while daily active use has increased tenfold. Users are therefore more interested in a single solution rather than purchasing multiple tools separately. An E7 license is cheaper than purchasing all the tools separately.

Massive price increases for licences and IT operations, overly complex and inflexible IT infrastructure: IT decision-makers are painfully aware of their dependence on manufacturers. They struggle with structural risks and often lack the courage to make a change.

Robin Kaufmann recently reflected the mood among IT decision-makers at the conference of the Microsoft partner association IAMCP in Munich. The head of the powerful user association VOICE speaks for over 450 companies, including many global corporations and medium-sized businesses.

Citing Gartner’s latest figures for global IT spending: $6.08 trillion – an increase of 10% – he added his own assessment: “On average, companies are spending 0.12% more on IT, which is effectively a zero growth rate, or even a decline in IT budgets when inflation is taken into account. This is the lowest level in many years.”

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission on Wednesday raided the Tokyo offices of Microsoft Japan as part of an investigation into whether the US technology group improperly restricted customers of its Azure cloud platform from using rival services, raising fresh scrutiny of its licensing practices in the world’s third-largest economy.

A source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters that the watchdog suspects a potential breach of Japan’s Antimonopoly Act relating to unfair trade practices. The person said the regulator is examining whether Microsoft Japan set conditions that effectively prevented customers from running its software on competing cloud platforms or imposed higher fees for doing so.

The source told Reuters that Japan’s antitrust authorities will also seek clarification from Microsoft’s US parent company as part of the probe. The Japan Fair Trade Commission declined to comment, while Microsoft Japan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to sources cited by Nikkei, investigators are focusing on whether Microsoft used its strength in products such as Windows Server and Microsoft 365 to steer customers towards Azure. The sources said licensing terms may have limited access to popular services on rival clouds or made their use uneconomical.

Azure competes globally with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for corporate and public sector contracts. Japan’s competition authority has in recent years intensified its oversight of large technology platforms, conducting on-site inspections and issuing corrective orders in digital markets.

Regulators in Britain, the European Union and the United States have separately examined Microsoft’s cloud practices, while Brazil’s antitrust authority last month opened an administrative investigation into the company’s local unit over cloud services.

The on-site inspection marks an escalation in Japan’s scrutiny of cloud computing contracts, a fast-growing sector central to corporate IT infrastructure, and could lead to formal orders or other remedies if violations are established.