Re: Can they not just jump straight to an unscaled per user price please?
It might be easier to show compliance when licensing per employee. Some licensing regimes are so difficult that it I wonder if simply proving compliance costs more than the bare license fees. Per-employee also scales with company size, so that a large company will always pay more than a small one, rather than giving 10 developers a single VM with a single license and telling them to timeshare.
I agree, the really large companies not only will balk at the sudden expense, but they also have more ability to find or create an alternative.