Similar situation at a previous employer, using a well-known engineering package. The business wanted to expand a cluster of servers which were a slack handful of versions out of date and needed license keys. Vendor reluctantly agreed to provide after hauling their key generator out of cold storage and getting it running again, on the proviso that the new servers were only for reviewing old files and NOT going to be used for production-level work. Appropriate promises were made, but I'll leave it to you to estimate how long that particular caveat was respected for...