It was a typical Monday morning for John, a structural engineer at a renowned architecture firm. He had a critical project deadline looming and needed to finalize the design of a high-rise building using ETABS, a software he had been using for years. As he booted up his computer and launched ETABS, his heart sank. The software wouldn't start, and an error message stared back at him: "License Error 18: Unable to acquire a license".