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. [email protected], then [email protected]… 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.
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
For that to have any impact, the abusing company leadership would need to have the ability to feel some level of shame. I honestly believe that most don’t have any ability for that.
consider the following: they already don’t get money from them and also showing to wide audience that
musk (and his people at spacex)idk who now is a inept penny-pinching scumbag can be a nice hobbyWait this is SpaceX? I thought it was another company tbh, I was under the impression that SpaceX revenue was in the billion at this point.
Pretty sure the 100s of millions was referring to back in 2015 or so when they started abusing the free trials.
wait, i missed that, but then idk why it got called “semi-governmental”
I think any space company is semi governmental since they are all funded by the government. I dunno man, it seems like the authors intent to misdirect have been successful. We don’t know who the company in question is.
now that i’m thinking: would be 4000 VMs enough for spacex? maybe it is some smaller organization. i also take it is state-owned or similar, which narrows it down to a handful of countries that launch satellites
and probably not government agency, because these would have people competent enough to do a git pull
Oh, absolutely, but it’s still an exercise in futility if the goal is to have any impact on the offending company’s demeanor and course of action.
Corporations are not people. They don’t have feelings.
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 house GUI.
Right? I was thinking that after a decade at some point it becomes your fault if you’re not taking steps against them. But no, not even a cease and desist.
I think a moderately competent lawyer would be able to build a case. Of course, it would get tied up in court for a while, but protecting IP is a big part of IP law (more on trademark I think, but IANAL). The C&D should have been sent a long time ago. It’s possible that this is a department that’s “moving fast and breaking things” and higher-ups said no to the license. In no way should that be considered to excuse the behaviour.