Why Didn't They Ask...
Actually not, but why would you not just license and use flexlm† (lmgrd) rather than reinvent the wheel?
The upside for your typical BoFH is that with a little skulduggery he or she can more or less easily temporarily circumvent flexlm based systems while licensing issues are being resolved (normally the boss supervising the PFY's kicking of heads in the accounts payable sewer.) Thieves honour ensured that the software vendor's rightful dues were quickly paid and the skulduggery removed.
If regomised Sam had lost or totalled his laptop and thereby losing the private halves of the key pairs he would have been in much deeper hole especially if the public halves of said key pairs were hard coded into his application.
It wouldn't be the first time I have fired up tcpdump to locate forgotten and lost services/servers that had finally gone AWOL paralysing critical applications.
When unencrypted services like FTP were being uncritically decommissioned without consultation by the usual security thespian suspects this wasn't an unusual occurrence. Try convincing these wizards that a jailed public anon-only FTP server running in a read only environment isn't a first class security threat (and that using a normal SSH service with sftp and keys isn't really an improvement in that particular situation.)
The same clowns firewalling the germane TCP ports on the enterprise licence servers is/was a pretty regular occurrence usually synchronised with the turnover of ITsec staff.
† Flexnet is a horse of a different colour which does seem to phone home like young Sam's.
