I have never really thought about this before but when you look through Sonar Platinum's impressive list of features a really large part of it is made up of third party add ons which presumably all attracted some sort of royalty payment. In comparison it looks like Cubase has one third party entry - Voxengo CurveEQ. I'm guessing that the list for the other DAWs is also small like Cubase's. 
 
Accepting that I may have missed some or incorrectly identified them the list below gives a quick insight to just how much of our Sonar Platinum product did not originate with Cakewalk. This ignores stuff like Sonitus and Z3TA that were acquired.
 
The obvious observation is that Cakewalk had very little to sell to the Sonar users who wanted to use the content in other products or user's of other DAWs. Equally obvious to any potential buyer is just how competitive would Sonar be without the third party items and how much of what is left could actually be packaged and sold to users. Outside of Z3TA 2, Rapture Pro, the "Engineering Suite", the 4 Cakewalk effects in the "Boutique Suite", CA2A and a repackaged ProChannel  VST "shell", which I think are all marketable, there really is not a lot.
 
Here's what I think the third party list looks like:
 
Melodyne Essential
Addictive Drums 2
Roland Groove Synth
Cakewalk TTS-1
SFZ Player
Lounge Lizard SONAR
Strum Session 2
TruePianos Amber
Ultra Analog Session 2
Analog Chorus CH2S
Analog Phaser APH2S
BlueVerb DRV-2080
Brickwall BW-2S
Compressor CP-2S
Compressor FA770
DeEsser DS-25
Equalizer BQ2S
Equalizer BX2S
Equalizer GEQ12
Equalizer PEQ2B
Equalizer PEQ5B
Equalizer PEQ322
Gate Expander GX622
Limiter LM2S
Oilcan Echo TLE2S
Stereo Imager ST2S
Tempo Delay 3D
Valve Driver ADR2S
TH3 Cakewalk Edition
Analog TrackBox
BREVERB SONAR
Tone2 Bifilter2
Bark of the Dog
REmatrix Solo
Softube Saturation Knob
Big Fish Audio Loop Library
Impulse Responses for REmatrix Solo
Synthetic IRs for REmatrix Solo

sincerely, i simply do not get your point..
 
My view is the total opposite.. Sonar had by a large margin the best bundled set of goodies, making the total package very appealing far more so that others DAWs. It is also moot.

Mystic38
sincerely, i simply do not get your point..
 
My view is the total opposite.. Sonar had by a large margin the best bundled set of goodies, making the total package very appealing far more so that others DAWs. It is also moot.

Agree that it is a moot point but I was shocked at how much of the package did not originate with Cakewalk the point being it may have been a great package but they were having to pay multiple third parties for every copy they sold. While that payment would have been pence in the pound compared to the list price of the included software with that many it would have added up. 

They probably did have to pay 3rd parties for some of the products, but for others they may have had other arrangements. For example all the "Cakewalk edition" plugins (TH3, AAS etc) might have actually been bundled free of charge as a mutually beneficial arrangement: so Sonar gets more bundled goodies and Overloud/AAS hope that Sonar users would get a taste for them and upgrade to the full version.
 
I upgraded to the full versions of both TH3 and AAS.
 
In the case of TH3, it was the best thing I did. I've got Revalver, GuitarRig 5 and Amplitube and TH3 is my favourite by a long shot.