A perhaps more salient example is one we faced last year: do we switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ? Nearly all of the Java developers we asked preferred IntelliJ. That's ok, no problem ... but we're facing switching 300 people from a free IDE to one that costs several hundred dollars, for internal appdev (not a product company, so all of the above hits the SG&A opex spend ... which the street always wants to be minimal). So, 300x$400, the 150X$400 MSDN subscriptions we have for the MS guys, plus ~1500 MS servers, plus about 300 RHEL servers, plus .... The point is, it all add up, and as Patrick (patio11) has noted several times, large companies much prefer bulk, one time POs to subscriptions. Being able to forecast and accrue for both Capex & Opex is extremely important in many large, thin margin companies, especially ones that are not IT-centric.
Your servers are the lion's share of your opex, so buy the licenses. That said, if Eclipse is working for you, I'm surprised the CE edition of Intellij isn't fine, too.
