I agree that a "license" is indeed a rather legacy term and links back to copyright and intellectual property which is very much bullshit and abused these days.

Going forward I see if more like paying for usage in the form of micropayments, more aligned to the value4value movement.

Would be interesting to try and integrate streaming payments into an application, to basically pay for how much you use it and nothing more. One possible issue I see is that you always need to be connected to the internet for that to work, I can see some scenarios where that would not be ideal. Maybe a solution around that would be getting some pre-paid amount in advance and then consuming that as you go.