Mailing the story:

Last fall Allan Grant was very upset following a meeting with his database vendor. Grant is the CIO of a large trading group with over $1 billion in sales. The database vendor had just completed a license audit and had concluded that the maximum allowed number of concurrent users had been exceeded by one for a three-minute interval during the week-long audit. Also the vendor had concluded that Grant's setup should henceforth be regarded as a "multiplexing" setup, even though it had not changed since the previous audit. To overcome both issues the vendor was proposing a new licensing agreement which would more than quadruple the total license cost.