yes, but at least until everything went back into the (mainframe) cloud, the opreational cost of running the software was coverd by the user.
My pc's hardware is mine, and the electricity bill is also mine.
So 'licensing' software is very much a form of rent.
Quite frankly this is an open problem. e.g. the debate about AWS suddenly providing, redis, elastcisearch, etc as a service and making the original developers redundant.
