Many of these want to know your revenue and then make a sales proposal based on your total revenue. This is frustrating for companies where software is a tiny proportion of the products/services. Example: recently tried to license software that wanted 1% of our sales when software makes up 0.003% of our sales by volume. I now don't even try to negotiate with these types of folks.

There it is right there. I'm not saying it's correct to do this, but this is the long and short of what's going on here. To get the big fish you have to sometimes sell at cost, because their name draws in the small orbiter fish who want to be big fish some day. If every small fish started demanding big fish rates, the entire thing stops. In a way this is emblematic of class privilege and wealth disparity issues at the moment.