Yep, I've been involved in many vender contracts at my company and the contracts take weeks to months to finalize because every aspect of the agreement is up for discussion. Even things like SLA's (including how they're calculated), liability limitations, indemnity, recourse in the event of system failure are all put through the ringer until both sides come to agreeable terms. This is true for big and tiny venders.

> Big companies negotiate liability terms.

I have never heard of that. Can you point to some examples?

Not SLA's (which are standard), but actual liability? E.g. if we brick your computers we'll pay for replacements and lost employee productivity?

> Big companies negotiate liability terms.

Never heard that in the context of the software licenses.

This isn't a Github project with a MIT license. When you do B2B software, there aren't software licenses, there are contractual terms and conditions. The T&Cs outline any number of elements but including SLAs, financial penalties for contractual breaches, etc. Larger customers negotiate these T&Cs line by line. Smaller customers often accept the standard T&Cs.

Penalties, as far as I was involved in vendor discussions, are a part of the negotiation only when the software provider does any work on the client's premises and are liable to that extent.

For software, you don't pay penalties that it might malfunction once in a while, that's what bug-fixes are for and you get offered an SLA for that, but only for response time, not actual bug fixing. Where you do get penalties and maybe even your money back, is when the software is listed as being able to do X,Y,Z and it only does X and Z and the contract says it must do everything it said it does.

Pretty standard in enterprise b2b, most of the sales cycle is in contracts

Well, probably no? I've never seen liabilities in dollar value, or rather any significant value. Also I saw our company Ceowdstrike contract for 10k+ seats, no liabilities there.