EDA license
Beginner
Paid permission to use a design program. Companies buy a set number, so only that many copies can run at once.
Novice
Paid permission to run a commercial tool. A company buys a number of licenses, and each running copy of the tool checks one out from a license server, so the count limits how many jobs can run at the same time. Licenses are often the largest tool cost.
Expert
License counts shape methodology: how many corners (combinations of manufacturing variation, voltage and temperature) can be analyzed in parallel, how many exploratory runs fit overnight, and whether renting extra cloud machines at busy times helps. Open-source tools remove this cap, so compute becomes the limit.
Explained in Tool landscape (Extras).