- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform.
Are they paying customers?
No.
Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?
Also no.
Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.
But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.
It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here’s what the “creative licensing strategy” has looked like over time:
As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.
When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We’re now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.
Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.
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This is what lawyers are for. They knowingly conspired to break TOS over the span of a decade after being politely prompted to pay for the service they stole. I love FOSS but the service side is not free and should not be the whipping boy of for profit companies. Fight back FFS.
I work for a company with over 150k employees and 50B in annual revenues. My developers need a software tool, which was already identified as critical for our development. Instead of getting about 20 user licenses, each of which costs about $400 per year, and which would cover all our needs, the responsible manager, in his infinite wisdom, got one license, so that users register with it only when they need that tool. We even had a shared spreadsheet as a wait list. The software provider caught on after a few months, and cut us off. The manager got a good rating in his KPI for saving money with his initial decision, and the software provider was blamed for ending our license. Office politics as usual.
Don’t know why they don’t shut them out from the trials. It’s good business to fire customers that are costing you money.
Send a lawyer’s cease and desist with a licensing bill to every email address they’ve used
Name and shame.
90% it is SpaceX.
Major NASA contractor, history of malfeasance, lawsuits, fake promises, and the head of it ran (untill quite recently) a government task force that illegally broke a whole bunch of IT shit, caused the largest series of cybersecurity breaches in history, committed a whole slew of brazenly illegal crimes… oh and the guy who runs it is notoriously incompetent at software development and managing software development.
Maybe 95%.
I struggle to think of a more ‘semi-governmental’ aerospace contractor, that also matches so well with all the described patterns.
Boeing or ULA or Lockheed are of course large aerospace contractors, but they’re not run by a guy who literally directly bought the last election, and they are usually a bit more formal with their corporate/management/negotiation bs.
$130m sounds way too low for SpaceX. I’m guessing Rocket Lab: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250508522849/en/Rocket-Lab-Announces-First-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results-Posting-Quarterly-Revenue-of-%24123m-Representing-32-Year-on-Year-Growth
rocket lab is 4x too big (that’s quarterly revenue, not annual)
Ah!
I totally skipped over that revenue figure, that is much more of a precise way to nail it down.
I submit my 5% or 10% loss chance to you, whoops!
And if someone from That Company is reading this: you still have time to do the right thing. You’ve got the rocket science down. Now try ethics.
💋🤌
Explain how to mesh that with “the stock price must go up each quarter, no matter what”
Picture a semi-governmental company
Also, relying on 30-day license that has to be refreshed on monthly basis, now with personal emails, is a sev1 waiting to happen. Very unmaintainable
Easy, just have two of your staff do alternate 24/7 shifts, renewing just in time. As long as this costs less than the price of licencing the proper way, still a “win”.
And as usual, that is not where the costs should be cut. Even with the current relegation of platform (I mean running mission-critical machines in cloud). I wouldn’t trust that company to be their customer if I knew they operate like that
I wouldn’t trust that company to be their customer if I knew they operate like that
Hahaha, I suggest you never look behind the scenes at an F500 then. This would be one of the more sane things to happen in that environment.
spill the beans? and jokes aside I would be down to help you with a web site or pdf compile, if you got what you hintibg on, especially with recipts; or at least, former employee who can back up
Take your protein pills and type new email in.
Block their IP range.
Maybe their idea is that publicly embarrassing oligarch boss of that company would be more effective in getting them to either use source code or buying a license
Then they would have needed to do something to publicly embarrass the company; so far they’ve only publicly embarrassed themselves
Real talk. Open source FREE FUCKING TRIAL‽ Like it’s the very least you could do is close that one obvious, glaring, foreseeable loophole. I mean if they had one half way decent developer, they could’ve just created their own version with an in hours GUI.
Corporations are not people. They don’t have feelings.
As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part? I think (as usual) some essential nuance got destroyed converting this article to a
clickbaitengagingexciting headline.To anyone that isn’t aware of this: big companies don’t give a fuck about anything except stock price going up. They will crush dreams every quarter to do this. They don’t care.
If you don’t like how a company is using your software and you’re hoping they will have a conscience/heart… don’t! Fix your license to make this use case illegal/impossible if it really matters to you.
Or, consider if Open Source is even the right license here (although I think the headline is a bit confused here)…
If you want this “fixed”, tweak your license and/or send a cease and desist to that company and/or seek damages. Changing nothing and waiting for them to do the right thing, you’re going to be waiting infinitely, because they will never do the right thing. They will do the thing that gets them the most revenue with the least spending. That’s all you can count on.
As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part?
Yes. There’s a number of projects which distribute binaries which aren’t as liberally licensed as the source they’re built from. E.g. Ardour is another one. There’s a demo version, subscriptions start as low as $1/month, $45 buys you the current major version and the next major version with all its updates, perpetual license. There’s also the implicit understanding that if you don’t pay up and want support, your bug reports better be developer-grade.
Basically it’s a way to get artists who are used to either freeware or commercial offerings to donate. Also as far as DAWs go it’s a fucking steal.
Vates spun up xcp-ng off the xen hypervisor and created a great “vsphere” like management plane called xen orchestra. Its a fantastic hypervisor with vsan/built in backups/etc. With vmware self immoliating after selling to Broadcom, they are an ideal stand in for vmwares primary product. Their licensing costs are wildly reasonable, even before the vmware debacle.
They have gone from “a guy” to a 100 person company in the last few years while sticking by the FOSS ethic entirely. You can build the project from source, or even grab a few github scripts that build it for you. They have always been open and clear about letting you build it and use it however you like.
They know how to cut this abusive behaviour off. They are fully capable. They don’t want to use those tools, legal or technical, because it goes against the spirit of FOSS, even if it’s to stop someone else who is abusing the spirit of FOSS.
Being good people, they are using “name and shame” first, and are even so kind as to leave the “name” part out for now. I expect that they may make some changes down the line if the org, and maybe others playing this same game, dont play nicer.
They have always been open and clear about letting you build it and use it however you like.
I don’t disagree with the want to license software like this. The downside then is a subset of “letting you build and use it any way you like” includes registering N trial accounts every 30 days. If this isn’t actually spelled out as illegal under the license, some jerkbag will do it. I wish we didn’t live in this world, but we do.
When Docker Desktop and Anaconda went… Well, I don’t know, the CEO started to get emails (politely) asking for money.
One could workshop some sales pitches and email the CEO.
Many CEOs at least hear about the unique emails they receive.
Will it have an impact? Yes. Will it positively impact your organization? Maybe.
Disturbingly similar to my employer.
Is it against the terms of service / use? If not - fair play to them. It’s stupid, but it’s easy to fix by adjusting the terms & conditions, and when they are in violation, completely deny all services to their ip range.
