It’s probably time to channel larry ellison and shake these guys down. Or at least shake their pockets for loose change.
They are stealing from you. As you point out you go out of your way to help companies with your oss options: you’re way on the right side of principled and generous. this is abuse. Don’t put up with it.
Given the history, I’d suggest a short C&D recounting the 10 years(!) of theft, the measures they’ve gone to, and tell them they have 15 days to either stop or get licensed, or you will seek 10 years of back licensing, interest and penalties. I assure you that you will receive a call from someone. Especially if you have to turn the software off on day 16.
Anyway this seems substantial to me, but also there’s an ethical and philosophical question of responsibilities. Do you have more responsibility to your employees and shareholders or to this space company? Even if you’re crazy rich as a company, I propose as the CEO you owe a pretty strong duty to those stakeholders to try and recover stolen assets. You don’t have to be mad at random spaceco, but I propose you might think hard before walking away.
Quick edit: just to frame your head on this: If the company is in the US then this behavior likely falls under DMCA anti-circumvention laws. if it does, people would have criminal liability. Now, I believe the DMCA is terrible legislation; it lets corporations create criminal liability through license agreements. But, it is the law of the land here, and I would guess as soon as your attorney can lay this out, and their attorneys get an eye on it, you will find willing negotiation happening.
I agree. The company will almost immediately settle because this is a cut and dry theft that will cost them (literally) millions just in the recoup. More if a penalty can be applied.
This won't go to court, the actions are indefensible. The only argument will be how much they have to pay the OPs company.
You can start by sending them a bill. Get legal advice on drafting it. Each month, a new bill, with the new charges for that month. After a few cycles, you start threatening to go to collection. It may take a while, but you'll collect eventually.
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
Oh for the love of tech, do chase them. This absolutely has to be in void of the terms of your trial take them to court. If not, then at the very least name and shame the company, so some dumb manager orchestrating this silly theft will get fired and someone more mature can be rotated in.
I’m actually considering reaching out directly to the CEO and telling the full story. But honestly? There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it. That’s part of what makes it so disappointing.
We’re not rushing into legal action — it’s not worth the energy for now — but publicly calling out the behavior felt necessary. It also sends a message to others in the ecosystem about the kind of nonsense OSS maintainers sometimes face.
And yes, while I’m still holding off on naming the company directly… I haven’t ruled it out.
I thought that was weird too. Surely this is a breach of whatever licensing they agreed to with the free trial. Are they allergic to getting paid for their work?
"Our product is so great aerospace companies are literally stealing it, also have you seen our new 30 day trial? So back to that aerospace company and how cheaply it could use our software, just take a look at our current offerings..."
Devil's advocate: If supplying an email address opens up a 30 day free trial, you can hardly complain when people do supply email addresses... especially when, to smooth the experience, there is absolutely nothing else but a email address field and a "start free trial" button.
People will always find ways to use things to the limit or abuse them. You need to consider where to put the limit to balance user experience vs. preventing abuse.
This is no way justifies this blatant illegal and immoral behavior, especially since the behavior seems excessive compared to what I state below but I have seen things like this tending to happen in places where it's next to impossible to get Accounting to pay or even renew anything on time before licenses for dev tools expire, rather than being an intentional way to save costs or "steal".
I've seen huge delays spanning months, and needing approvals from the very top, which you need to keep following up and makes the entire process a very painful experience.
Maybe it's by design to reduce costs but it happens even in places where the budget is overflowing and underused.
Payments won't happen until things are literally burning or production is about to go down tomorrow and the fear of the client getting super mad(that a relatively small payment couldn't be made in months) will drive some urgency. Sometimes not even then, so people are left with bad choices, let something terrible happen or make terrible workarounds like in the article. This results in a drive to only use free tools or make do with none.
I hope this results in better and easier accounting practices, which is probably ripe for disruption.
At my last job (a billion dollar company) someone had set up some kind of proxy where one free user account was used by ~100 employees. We wanted some more features they didn't offer so we looked at some of their competitors. I was in the meeting where we were going to decide to keep using what we had or use the better solution (in my opinion). Both were presented fairly except for the price. The plan was to continue the piracy, not paying what it should cost, or use the other service which would have been cheaper if done legally. I voiced my concern that if we are going to compare them we should at least compare them with their actual cost. No one shared my concern and they ended up with not switching a just continue pirating, even though money wasn't really an issue. The person who set this up wasn't in the company anymore, but I guess no one wanted to deal with this issue and decided it was easier to ignore it.
How much money did they save over 5-10 years through this illegal or unethical behavior?
If "Rocket Company" averaged 30 machines per month, max $1600 per month let's say $600k / year before discount. Maybe kept 3 million dollars over 10 years. I imagine the only way Vates will get paid for their service is if control is taken from the operational groups doing the actual work and "abstracted" to a centralized IT group.
> But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
Love it. I appreciate the humor and good example behind that.
It's entirely likely the company is spending more money on staff time, than on the product.
I also cannot even imagine running mission-critical stuff on free trials (I have heard of it, before. I think Adobe was successfully sued, once, because someone created an image in their free trial, and then, couldn't open it, after the trial expired).
If I were one of that company's customers, I'd be fairly concerned.
Tell them that their free trial is over and their company will no longer receive free trial keys. You can do that. It doesn't require a lawyer and it doesn't require threats. Just "We're glad you like our product! Unfortunately we can no longer support you with free trials." Be polite.
If they secretly keep getting free trials by pretending to be unaffiliated, then escalate to 1) blocking the fake ones when you discover them (very annoying to them, even if you don't get them all) and 2) as a very last resort, legal threats.
The goal is to get them onboarded as paying customers. Every other outcome is effectively a loss. You want to be polite but firm.
If it was me, I'd have- at the least - a little routine in the trial-signup logic on the backend which would check the company name and known aliases, and return "not eligible for free, but sales would love to talk! Have a nice day!" message.
I think the most depressing thing is how unsurprising this is.
This is why free trials require credit cards upfront, as they're more difficult to fake, not because you're about to be stealth billed. It's thanks to people like this.
it's practically trivial to bypass this if you really want to. CapitalOne in the US allows you to have virtual cards that can be verified but you can delete and block at any time for free if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure the practice discourages casuals from gaming trials, but it just feels like it's making life miserable for paying customers but doing almost nothing to stop bad actors
As CTO, I feel pretty strongly about this type of behavior and lie the blame squarely on the Aerospace Co’s CTO.
Being scrappy early on is part of the job, but when you are starting to generate revenue it’s time to convert your free tiers to starter tiers as you scale.
I’m sorry that there are people in our industry who choose to behave this way.
I agree 120% with you...
... but I am wondering about how good you are using free tiers.
IMHO the free tier in cloud/saas just offsets the initial costs of using the cloud/saas.
So... unless you're really small free tiers won't work for you.
I had this happen on a consumer startup with referrals. Every month like clockwork one person would fake referrals to get a free moth, which involved jumping through non trivial hoops (re-installing all, creating content in the fake account, going back). all to save $5, and when we had a free plan with almost the exact same quality.
I think the thrill of beating a system and getting away with is as much a factor as anything. And I get it.
I used to work in IT in a large corporation back in the days. Amount of work necessary to procure software was so staggering, that any alternative "creative solution" would be much more preferable. And the worst thing is that the cheap software was the one that suffered most. The gazillion-dollar CISCO upgrade was no problem, it's already gazillion dollars. But to get $10 email shareware license one would spend many work-hours of many people, so who's gonna do it.
Took a meeting once with a customer who had been evaluating our product, which was not OSS. It was a nice meeting, they loved our product and seemingly they would purchase. Awkwardly the guy said their CEO had a rule: they could only use OSS. Their own product was not OSS.
Yes I am having this with trying to get some Neurodiversity software on my laptop, lots of people keen to help, government even refunds the cost, but setting up a new supplier is hard work, and then security approval too.
Assuming this telling is pretty accurate, I'm wondering what the thinking was on both ends.
On the freeloader end: Did they think they were within the rules? How far up was the approval to keep doing it this way? Did someone try to pay, but get blocked? Did someone tell their boss they did this all in-house, and now doesn't want to admit they outsourced and exposed the company? Did it go to the top, and a lawyer told them to put the company name and a real person each time, and that they were covered on good faith if they only did that?
On the provider end: Seeing this locked-in enterprise user for 10 years, how was a salesperson not all over that that slam-dunk sale? How did they let this go on for 10 years without tweaking their policy to stop the freeloader and any others who might emulate them? What did the business people say about this over the years when it came up? Was business so good it wasn't worth the time to convert the freeloader to a paying customer?
I have a theory this happens because for individual contributors, the effort to buy SaaS software in the era of "vendor risk assessment" is a nightmare. So you end up with grassroots avoidance of that process, at all costs, inside the company.
As a solo-founder I have experienced this on a massive scale over nearly 15 years. It's really strange how happy people are with unethical behavior, yet on my end it just doesn't feel right to cut off peoples systems. After multiple attempts to contact them, we will often disable their accounts. It is against the social contract. It is stealing. In many cases companies may have 15+ free trial accounts, the company itself absolutely dwarfs our 3-person company. The cost is beans for them. But they just don't care.
Same. Large companies keep freeloading and ask for support. They buy a single personal license and share it among employees. And it’s not some small shops from poor countries, where you can understand it, it’s (often German) enterprises…
Dealing with this right now as a consultant. Also a 'semi-govt' company, with much more in annual revenue than in this article, running a highly critical production workload, and is having problems with a ESOL version Open Source software - that they are scared to touch/upgrade, and that is available in a fully up-to-date version, for purchase, with support etc., and indirectly asking us to support it, by essentially pawning off any and all changes related to said SW to me. Well, I recommended the upgrade path (to a current/supported and paid version) and I stopped making any changes to that component. They are still hemming an hawing, its unbelievable.
You could indirectly promote this unnamed reference customer with a dedicated marketing page. This blog post is already the seed of a case study. List the top ten unnamed companies who requested trials, by industry sector, sorted in descending order by count and years and VMs, with them at top. Presumably #2 - #10 have much smaller numbers.
Placed in a marketing context, this human attention could be converted to revenue from other customers. Fund a creative writing competition on VeryBigCo Procurement Anti-Patterns and Shadow IT. Prizes could be paid licenses. If you get enough entries, ask a business school to do a case study on the same subject, then organize a multi-vendor survey on the topic. Also, memes.
You may also need to update the ToS on the trial. At some point, a motivated salesperson could convert the account with a multi-year license that covers both past and future usage.
Totally tangent: What's a 30-day Rial? GenAI poster art with no spell checking I guess. Yet all of the pages of paper are spelled correctly. So now I'm wondering if there was a typo in the prompt used to create the art, or if the genAI is just unaware of the same text being used repeatedly while making a slight change in one place?
until openai’s recent updates, this was a very common issue with genai art… sometimes you could not even beg it to spell it correctly haha. in my experience, o3’s generation is much, much better in this regard.
I can imagine the investors in this company would not be pleased with this kind of scrappy nonsense, especially given the industry.
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
It's likely that the CEO is not aware(...hopefully); it's a good idea to reach out to them asap. Do try and point out what's going on.
If anything, the sooner you reach out, you'll be doing the business (and whoever is backing it) a favor: trust has been misplaced. Somebody chose a very unprofessional path with what (one can assume) is a very critical system.
If they're using it in prod then there are plenty of regulations that should force them to establish a real support relationship.
Sometimes this type of stuff happens for a prototype that an org is trying to get funded, but not for 10 years. I'd collect all of the org email addresses they used for the initial d/ls and contact them first- maybe one of the ones from ten years ago has gotten promoted to a point where they can establish a paid relationship or approve use of the open source version.
Isn't this a failure by the company to recognize free trial abuse sooner? and to not close the loophole immediately seems like even more of a weak behavior. Calling them out but not taking decisive action beyond claiming that they are acting immorally ultimately accomplishes nothing. Businesses are not beholden to your ideas about what is nice and fair, but whatever the rules and constraints are to your system. if you keep a practice like this that allows free trial abuse forever, why would they spend money?
You're absolutely right that businesses act within whatever constraints exist — and yes, we were a bit naive. We assumed that if someone had a fully functional, free, open source version available (well-documented and easy to install), nobody sane would go out of their way to abuse the trial system instead.
To be clear, it’s not just trial abuse — it’s actively ignoring the better, freer option in favor of repeatedly faking evaluations just to get the “easy mode.”
We’ll definitely tighten things up going forward. But in nearly a decade of doing this, they're the only ones to push it to this scale. So yeah, they've earned a spot in our open source hall of shame
Agreed. I would hellban their entire company permanently, and devote time and effort to write tooling to catch future signup attempts. This is utterly despicable.
It's pretty straightforward to me at least what needs to be done. Add 2fa sms authentication and restrict trials to one per phone number. It's less easier to get new phone numbers.
and most 2fa security dont use sms any more. It's an insecure option - forcing it sucks for the legit customers. But if you don't force it, then one can bypass the sms and thus no longer need a phone number. Or you can try force sms on first login, _then_ allow the move to use a OTP app.
And even with this, what happens if the company simply shares the company phone, authenticate, then remove the phone and switch to OTP (for each time, or each user)? Unless if a phone number cannot be used twice...which means you have to keep storing it, and handle the support requests when a number is legitimately recycled (and how do you differentiate that?)
Offering something that is quite full featured for free (even as a trial) will get it exploited; it's only going to increasely be the case going forward. The internet is hostile, and getting more hostile.
OP says the offending company is quasi governmental aerospace. Sounds like a defense contractor.
There will be a security officer at such a company. If I was that officer, I would be profoundly unhappy that employees, whose job (by the nature of the company) regularly takes them into classified waters, were freely giving their personal gmails to a third party overseas. I mean, you just broadened the attack surface on the employees by tying them to their presence in the Google ecosystem. Yikes.
I wonder if you can sue for breach of contract or something. Maybe not worth it... I would consider adding some actual limitations into the free trial rather than just time.
Was thinking the same. If you clearly are only meant to have access for X days, and abuse a loophole to continue indefinitely, how is that far removed from hacking/scamming/stealing/pickyourpoison?
I saw that your company is in Grenoble. Just drop me an email, and I will personally come to your office and help set up tirreno to resolve this trial abuse.
You cared enough to write a blog post so I think talking to a lawyer is worthwhile. Perhaps if you send them a legal letter threatening international action they will pony up. Writing the CEO will get you nowhere. Either way this is lame behavior and the public deserves to know the company so we can avoid doing business with them. But I understand not wanting to open yourself up for retaliation.
You realize that you just gave hacker news gave enough details to commit some satellite controlling backdoor into their system... It's not like some of us aren't going to be like: "Yeah, let's get 'em!" Not me. I'm the ethical type, but some people might think:
Step 1: Modify OSS repository to gain control of satellites
Step 2: ...
Step 3: Profit!
Knowing the details of an open source tool a company uses does not magically give you a backdoor.
By that logic, merely knowing coinbase uses the open source go language for some things would let you steal all their crypto, and I assure you if it was that simple their coffers would be empty.
btw I use linux and firefox and have an unencrypted bitcoin wallet.dat on my computer, feel free to prove me wrong.
Entirely understandable why it wouldn't be named. And that the comments section would have some people guessing. I wonder if it isn't a company named after an insect, given the revenue and timeline of their operations seems to match with that graph, but the "semi-governmental" is throwing me off.
How about the opposite? You're not a paying customer, don't use trials... but let us put your logo in our website as a valued user... with some praise from the CTO, please.
Time to disable the free trial for a month halfway into their trial and see how it goes. This is probably why most trials now request you to reach sales first (well, on top of obviously ensuring they have a way to send an offer).
This is a classic case of IP abuse, and it's tough to ignore. If the company has been using your work without a license for a decade, that’s a huge liability on their side. It might be time to remind them that open source is not free labor, and they can’t just brush off 10 years of unpaid work. At the very least, they should come to the table for a serious negotiation.
Change your terms slightly, to say that if you abuse the free trial say over 100 times, any user using the free trial agrees to a permanent irrevocable license to any of their IP
EDIT
Change your terms to require any usage off planet specifically prohibited by the free trial license
The most concerning part in this article is this: "To me, that’s a pretty blatant breach of the unwritten “moral contract” of Open Source."
It talks about the breach of some unwritten contract. But surely they should have a very written, real world contract to describe the terms of that 15 day trial. And this should be a breach of that. The fact that this is not mentioned, or even entertained as a notion is concerning.
Moral contracts are good for philosophy discussions. Real contracts are much better when you need to use instruments of law to get someone to something.
I’m reminded of the “business ethics” scene in Billy Madison[0]. This is what capitalism has wrought in the US: People for whom ethics are anathema, or arguably worse: a completely unexamined topic.
Complete assclown behavior throughout. It would be one thing if this had been going for for a month or two, maybe a quarter or two… but ten years?! They’re clearly fucking you over out of either malice and/or incompetence, and by allowing it to go on, you’re politely enabling them to do this bad behavior to someone else’s business.
If you feed stray dogs, you end up with a neighborhood full of dogshit everywhere you step. Bill them; if they don’t pay, talk to an attorney.
Dude, quit whining in a blog post and change your policy. Make it per-org instead of per-email. Heck, carve out an exception to block that particular org.
I first write my entire text and then after that I use a LLM to fix the grammar and have a better flow. I'm doing my best but I'm not a native US speaker. Before LLMs, people complained about the weird sentences or mistakes I made. Pick your poison ;)
Anyway, I'm doing my best to keep my own "signature" in writing, but it's really hard when you see a better phrasing generated on your original more limited vocabulary. But anyway, I'll do better next time, thanks for the feedback!
Unhappy with AI generated contributions, but perfectly happy to have a big AI generated image at the top of their page, complete with spelling mistakes
vessenes|9 months ago
They are stealing from you. As you point out you go out of your way to help companies with your oss options: you’re way on the right side of principled and generous. this is abuse. Don’t put up with it.
Given the history, I’d suggest a short C&D recounting the 10 years(!) of theft, the measures they’ve gone to, and tell them they have 15 days to either stop or get licensed, or you will seek 10 years of back licensing, interest and penalties. I assure you that you will receive a call from someone. Especially if you have to turn the software off on day 16.
Anyway this seems substantial to me, but also there’s an ethical and philosophical question of responsibilities. Do you have more responsibility to your employees and shareholders or to this space company? Even if you’re crazy rich as a company, I propose as the CEO you owe a pretty strong duty to those stakeholders to try and recover stolen assets. You don’t have to be mad at random spaceco, but I propose you might think hard before walking away.
Quick edit: just to frame your head on this: If the company is in the US then this behavior likely falls under DMCA anti-circumvention laws. if it does, people would have criminal liability. Now, I believe the DMCA is terrible legislation; it lets corporations create criminal liability through license agreements. But, it is the law of the land here, and I would guess as soon as your attorney can lay this out, and their attorneys get an eye on it, you will find willing negotiation happening.
cogman10|9 months ago
This won't go to court, the actions are indefensible. The only argument will be how much they have to pay the OPs company.
Animats|9 months ago
florbnit|9 months ago
Oh for the love of tech, do chase them. This absolutely has to be in void of the terms of your trial take them to court. If not, then at the very least name and shame the company, so some dumb manager orchestrating this silly theft will get fired and someone more mature can be rotated in.
plam503711|9 months ago
We’re not rushing into legal action — it’s not worth the energy for now — but publicly calling out the behavior felt necessary. It also sends a message to others in the ecosystem about the kind of nonsense OSS maintainers sometimes face.
And yes, while I’m still holding off on naming the company directly… I haven’t ruled it out.
FactolSarin|9 months ago
josefx|9 months ago
"Our product is so great aerospace companies are literally stealing it, also have you seen our new 30 day trial? So back to that aerospace company and how cheaply it could use our software, just take a look at our current offerings..."
mytailorisrich|9 months ago
People will always find ways to use things to the limit or abuse them. You need to consider where to put the limit to balance user experience vs. preventing abuse.
InsideOutSanta|9 months ago
nand_gate|9 months ago
Genius marketing, I guess Rocket Company is supposed to be exploiting the OSS community, but who built Xen ;)
Before you soapbox on the 'open source moral contract' consider repaying the OSS works you gladly derived.
ivewonyoung|9 months ago
I've seen huge delays spanning months, and needing approvals from the very top, which you need to keep following up and makes the entire process a very painful experience.
Maybe it's by design to reduce costs but it happens even in places where the budget is overflowing and underused.
Payments won't happen until things are literally burning or production is about to go down tomorrow and the fear of the client getting super mad(that a relatively small payment couldn't be made in months) will drive some urgency. Sometimes not even then, so people are left with bad choices, let something terrible happen or make terrible workarounds like in the article. This results in a drive to only use free tools or make do with none.
I hope this results in better and easier accounting practices, which is probably ripe for disruption.
o_m|9 months ago
axus|9 months ago
If "Rocket Company" averaged 30 machines per month, max $1600 per month let's say $600k / year before discount. Maybe kept 3 million dollars over 10 years. I imagine the only way Vates will get paid for their service is if control is taken from the operational groups doing the actual work and "abstracted" to a centralized IT group.
ChrisMarshallNY|9 months ago
Love it. I appreciate the humor and good example behind that.
It's entirely likely the company is spending more money on staff time, than on the product.
I also cannot even imagine running mission-critical stuff on free trials (I have heard of it, before. I think Adobe was successfully sued, once, because someone created an image in their free trial, and then, couldn't open it, after the trial expired).
If I were one of that company's customers, I'd be fairly concerned.
stickfigure|9 months ago
If they secretly keep getting free trials by pretending to be unaffiliated, then escalate to 1) blocking the fake ones when you discover them (very annoying to them, even if you don't get them all) and 2) as a very last resort, legal threats.
The goal is to get them onboarded as paying customers. Every other outcome is effectively a loss. You want to be polite but firm.
pnathan|9 months ago
matt-p|9 months ago
This is why free trials require credit cards upfront, as they're more difficult to fake, not because you're about to be stealth billed. It's thanks to people like this.
rocketvole|9 months ago
balls187|9 months ago
Being scrappy early on is part of the job, but when you are starting to generate revenue it’s time to convert your free tiers to starter tiers as you scale.
I’m sorry that there are people in our industry who choose to behave this way.
eb0la|9 months ago
scosman|9 months ago
I think the thrill of beating a system and getting away with is as much a factor as anything. And I get it.
kova12|9 months ago
e40|9 months ago
zeristor|9 months ago
sublinear|9 months ago
neilv|9 months ago
On the freeloader end: Did they think they were within the rules? How far up was the approval to keep doing it this way? Did someone try to pay, but get blocked? Did someone tell their boss they did this all in-house, and now doesn't want to admit they outsourced and exposed the company? Did it go to the top, and a lawyer told them to put the company name and a real person each time, and that they were covered on good faith if they only did that?
On the provider end: Seeing this locked-in enterprise user for 10 years, how was a salesperson not all over that that slam-dunk sale? How did they let this go on for 10 years without tweaking their policy to stop the freeloader and any others who might emulate them? What did the business people say about this over the years when it came up? Was business so good it wasn't worth the time to convert the freeloader to a paying customer?
MarkusQ|9 months ago
https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinks
ruffrey|9 months ago
cruffle_duffle|9 months ago
Meneth|9 months ago
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/companies/rocket-lab-rev...
nickfromseattle|9 months ago
I don't think it's Rocket Lab.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RKLB/rocket-lab-us...
tecleandor|9 months ago
millzlane|9 months ago
m1keil|9 months ago
ruffrey|9 months ago
BonoboIO|9 months ago
vsl|9 months ago
methods21|9 months ago
walterbell|9 months ago
Placed in a marketing context, this human attention could be converted to revenue from other customers. Fund a creative writing competition on VeryBigCo Procurement Anti-Patterns and Shadow IT. Prizes could be paid licenses. If you get enough entries, ask a business school to do a case study on the same subject, then organize a multi-vendor survey on the topic. Also, memes.
You may also need to update the ToS on the trial. At some point, a motivated salesperson could convert the account with a multi-year license that covers both past and future usage.
dylan604|9 months ago
keeganpoppen|9 months ago
d2bayes|9 months ago
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
It's likely that the CEO is not aware(...hopefully); it's a good idea to reach out to them asap. Do try and point out what's going on.
If anything, the sooner you reach out, you'll be doing the business (and whoever is backing it) a favor: trust has been misplaced. Somebody chose a very unprofessional path with what (one can assume) is a very critical system.
panzagl|9 months ago
If they're using it in prod then there are plenty of regulations that should force them to establish a real support relationship.
Sometimes this type of stuff happens for a prototype that an org is trying to get funded, but not for 10 years. I'd collect all of the org email addresses they used for the initial d/ls and contact them first- maybe one of the ones from ten years ago has gotten promoted to a point where they can establish a paid relationship or approve use of the open source version.
EDEdDNEdDYFaN|9 months ago
plam503711|9 months ago
To be clear, it’s not just trial abuse — it’s actively ignoring the better, freer option in favor of repeatedly faking evaluations just to get the “easy mode.”
We’ll definitely tighten things up going forward. But in nearly a decade of doing this, they're the only ones to push it to this scale. So yeah, they've earned a spot in our open source hall of shame
duxup|9 months ago
I can understand that.
Obstacles to free trials and such often are more hassle than their worth and a determined person can get around them anyway.
sgarland|9 months ago
robotwizard|9 months ago
chii|9 months ago
And even with this, what happens if the company simply shares the company phone, authenticate, then remove the phone and switch to OTP (for each time, or each user)? Unless if a phone number cannot be used twice...which means you have to keep storing it, and handle the support requests when a number is legitimately recycled (and how do you differentiate that?)
Offering something that is quite full featured for free (even as a trial) will get it exploited; it's only going to increasely be the case going forward. The internet is hostile, and getting more hostile.
kjellsbells|9 months ago
There will be a security officer at such a company. If I was that officer, I would be profoundly unhappy that employees, whose job (by the nature of the company) regularly takes them into classified waters, were freely giving their personal gmails to a third party overseas. I mean, you just broadened the attack surface on the employees by tying them to their presence in the Google ecosystem. Yikes.
tecleandor|9 months ago
Isar Aerospace has funding from NATO, for example :P
IshKebab|9 months ago
matsemann|9 months ago
reconnecting|9 months ago
[0] https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno
(creator of tirreno)
reconnecting|9 months ago
I saw that your company is in Grenoble. Just drop me an email, and I will personally come to your office and help set up tirreno to resolve this trial abuse.
arp242|9 months ago
How does it detect if an email account is freshly registered?
bradleyankrom|9 months ago
bix6|9 months ago
slippy|9 months ago
Step 1: Modify OSS repository to gain control of satellites Step 2: ... Step 3: Profit!
TheDong|9 months ago
Knowing the details of an open source tool a company uses does not magically give you a backdoor.
By that logic, merely knowing coinbase uses the open source go language for some things would let you steal all their crypto, and I assure you if it was that simple their coffers would be empty.
btw I use linux and firefox and have an unencrypted bitcoin wallet.dat on my computer, feel free to prove me wrong.
0x_rs|9 months ago
stefanos82|9 months ago
How about creating a "Wall of Shame" page and name shaming such companies, until the get the message that they have the financial resources to pay?
eb0la|9 months ago
Algent|9 months ago
Time to disable the free trial for a month halfway into their trial and see how it goes. This is probably why most trials now request you to reach sales first (well, on top of obviously ensuring they have a way to send an offer).
gregorvand|9 months ago
Why not do what most profit-conscious companies would do and just say "we notice unusual activity and.."
fennecbutt|9 months ago
Koshima|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
stackedinserter|9 months ago
BonoboIO|9 months ago
nickdothutton|9 months ago
jarland|9 months ago
“Deceptive use against third party services by creating multiple email accounts to pretend to be multiple users of their service”
Because if you want to maintain a good reputation with people, you don’t facilitate people taking advantage of them.
gravity757|9 months ago
There are a lot of private space companies but only a few fit the “semi-governmental” description. Lockheed is one of them.
Revenue numbers for 2024 fit also. For Terran Orbital that is. Obviously Lockheed does WAY more than that.
caffeinatedwo|9 months ago
aorloff|9 months ago
EDIT
Change your terms to require any usage off planet specifically prohibited by the free trial license
theginger|9 months ago
The worst they can do is not pay it.
e40|9 months ago
billy99k|9 months ago
nodesocket|9 months ago
plam503711|9 months ago
ithrablip|9 months ago
Arr, the use of "pirouetting" is such ticklingly brilliant punnage, mematey.
krisoft|9 months ago
It talks about the breach of some unwritten contract. But surely they should have a very written, real world contract to describe the terms of that 15 day trial. And this should be a breach of that. The fact that this is not mentioned, or even entertained as a notion is concerning.
Moral contracts are good for philosophy discussions. Real contracts are much better when you need to use instruments of law to get someone to something.
Henchman21|9 months ago
So, is the company SpaceX or what?
0: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xKGeHuln08A
thunkingdeep|9 months ago
If you feed stray dogs, you end up with a neighborhood full of dogshit everywhere you step. Bill them; if they don’t pay, talk to an attorney.
koakuma-chan|9 months ago
c16|9 months ago
rounce|9 months ago
_joel|9 months ago
niam|9 months ago
God bless those among us who steal the candy bowl at Halloween.
rvz|9 months ago
Job done.
etimberg|9 months ago
Spooky23|9 months ago
Worst case, they just mysteriously stop using your product.
amtre|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
aaron695|9 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
bawana|9 months ago
[deleted]
phkahler|9 months ago
rideontime|9 months ago
plam503711|9 months ago
Anyway, I'm doing my best to keep my own "signature" in writing, but it's really hard when you see a better phrasing generated on your original more limited vocabulary. But anyway, I'll do better next time, thanks for the feedback!
funki|9 months ago
(I'm not a native speaker either)
voidUpdate|9 months ago
garrettjoecox|9 months ago
Unless your job involves critiquing the header image of people’s personal blogs I don’t think these are equivalent.