9 ms·

> 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 c

> 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.

plam503711 1y ago
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.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  one option is to talk to their customers. the customers almost certainly don't know, and might be interested to know that their launch provider is possibly going to have some serious issues
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- TZubiri 1y ago
  Just straight to court " it’s not worth the energy for now" Not sure what the amount is, but Small Claims is pretty straightforward and energy efficient? You can get like 10K depending on jurisdiction. The whole trial is like 1 hour.
  - plam503711 1y ago
    We operate globally, and this company isn’t even on our continent. On top of that, it’s a semi state-operated entity — so you can probably imagine where any legal effort would end up: somewhere between bureaucratic limbo and /dev/null.
    - TZubiri 1y ago
      Ah I didn't consider that. International case certainly is going to be more complex. That said, I think that small cases are still worth pursuing on a matter of principle and strategy. It's better to practice pursuing payment from international clients when it's small amounts you don't care about, so that you are prepared if you have an issue with a huge client and bankruptcy is on the line.
- casey2 1y ago
  It sounds like you’re navigating a really difficult and emotionally draining situation—and I respect the restraint and clarity in how you’re approaching it.
- bambax 1y ago
  > publicly calling out the behavior > I’m still holding off on naming the company directly Does not compute. Why not name them?
  - balls187 1y ago
    Lawsuits aren’t fun.
    - bambax 1y ago
      Aren't they? I sued a huge multinational company years ago, as an individual. People predicted the apocalypse. I won. It was lots of fun. (It was in France so the lawyers' fees weren't what they are in the US. But the way people advised me not to sue, was very similar.)
  - chii 1y ago
    by declaring, but not acting yet, the OP gives the company an out, and allow a potential payday to come. After all, everybody is after money. Any action which seems strange or wild, when considered from the POV of making money, would start to sense.
  - Philpax 1y ago
    Because as long as they don't name them, there's still a chance they'll pay up or self-host. As soon as they do name them, any chance of a meaningful business relationship will disappear.
    - hungryhobbit 1y ago
      Did you read how much work these people put into not paying? I think that ship has sailed long ago.
  - mattmaroon 1y ago
    Because they could sue you. Even if the suit is baseless it’ll cost a lot to defend, and you might accidentally give them some basis in the process
- russfink 1y ago
  First, congrats on having a successful company and doing what you love (and employing others - a great feeling to know you are helping technical folks live their dream). Second, some thoughts. A. State in your policy that multiple trials are possible but may incur a rest period between activations for a “given company.” Even 5 days should be reasonable for honest folks but cause a pain point for dishonest ones. B. If you can add a license activation feature to your software, collect metrics when you present the license activation screen, and “bake in” the telemetry to your trial license key request. Things like CPU ID, hard drive serial numbers, TPM quotes, asset tag serial number. Use that telemetry to determine “given company.” The abusers are likely installing this on the same system over and over. C. Independent of the activation idea, If the trial hard-stops after 30 days, maybe you could delay the approval process on all new trials by X days (X randomly chosen from range 0..5, and all trial requests independent of requestor) and then activate the product for 30-X days. Assuming the dishonests have integrated the VM into their production systems, this will cause an unpredictable unavailability and trigger a pain point somewhere. At worst, it will cause them to step up their request efforts. As others probably are saying, this might be one for the lawyers.
  - eb0la 1y ago
    I believe all options you suggest are more than OK, but. Why don't you limit the trial with some capacity limits? Say, 1000 vms for installation. Of course, you'll need to have two artifacts: one for paying customers, and a second one to non-paying ones.
- 1234letshaveatw 1y ago
  I very much doubt the CEO is aware. It is much more likely that some person is doing this because that is what they have always done- they are coasting. Alternatively, it is some poor sap that is in over their head and just following some instructions the original jerk put together to keep things running. The CEO will prob hand you off to some director who is going to be annoyed that they were made out to look foolish and that they now have a task that the CEO is going to want regular status updates on.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- bsza 1y ago
  Sad to hear this and I hope (some semblance of) justice will be served, but just to play the devil’s advocate: if you refuse to name them, how can we know you’re telling the truth and not just pulling a publicity stunt?
- threeseed 1y ago
  > There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it Why would you think that a CEO would involve himself in matters like this ? Especially given that whichever aerospace company it is would be far more concerned with issues like tariffs, geopolitics, recession risks etc than whether or not a company is using an open source versus a community edition of some forgettable infrastructure component. Also choosing to pursue legal action instead of simply blocking them from downloading more free trials seems childish and short sighted.
  - plam503711 1y ago
    "forgettable infrastructure component": this is what runs their entire IT. We build both the hypervisor and the backup/orchestration for it. Our stack could kill their entire operations if it's down because $whatever. 4000 virtual machines running isn't just the print server or the coffee machine.
    - threeseed 1y ago
      No they run their entire IT. Not you. They can easily move to the hundreds of alternative platforms which do exactly the same thing.
      - plam503711 1y ago
        I'm not sure you are aware about the cost of migrating from one virtualization platform to another, especially when you have 4000 VMs. I can tell you it's not exactly easy, and that's even our business now (migrating from VMware to our stack). It's not like changing a light bulb.
    - Disposal8433 1y ago
      > 4000 virtual machines At that point I would have created some scripts to randomly reboot or fuck with their VMs. How long will you accept this? They won't pay ever.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Huh? Blocking them seems much more "actual fight" and disruptive than going for legal action. Legal action was invented to settle disputues without resorting to raw power.
- Edman274 1y ago
  If you don't do anything legally threatening, then you make it that much harder for every single OSS vendor to make money, because the precedent is getting established that there is no penalty for breaking the rules. When I was a teenager I would do super cut-rate work on computers for people, and my father did helpfully point out that undercharging for valuable work just makes it harder for people whose day job is to do the same work, because then they have to compete with a naive teenager. You're the kind hearted OSS / freemium vendor in this case. Threatening legal action costs nothing. Punishment is meant as a deterrent for antisocial behavior. Failing to even threaten them will result in less money going to people who deliver a public good.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    > Threatening legal action costs nothing. Not really. If you want it to have teeth, then it should come under a lawyer's letterhead, and that usually costs something (probably not much, for one letter).
  - threeseed 1y ago
    > Threatening legal action costs nothing It costs your reputation as a vendor which is permanent. You don't threaten legal action against companies before calmly advising them of the situation.
    - Edman274 1y ago
      There's no obligation to publicly reveal the threat of a lawsuit to a party that is abusing your license. In fact, if you don't reveal the existence of the lawsuit, the only way then that you'd gain that reputation is if the threatened party then publishes their threat, which they won't do if they straight up know that they're in the wrong, because then that damages their reputation. Why would a big company publish a blog about a small company suing them for blatantly violating their software license? They want that crap to go away. Get the money. Shaming a company doesn't make anyone any money unless they decide to voluntarily comply, which is what is being asked here. They're being asked to voluntarily do the right thing. If they were likely to voluntarily do the right thing, they would've done that first.
- bmacho 1y ago
  > We’re not rushing into legal action — it’s not worth the energy for now — but publicly calling out the behavior felt necessary. Wth. Why go public instead of just .. emailing them, and asking for payment?
  - Kikawala 1y ago
    They did reach out. So we reached out. They vaguely apologized and claimed they’d switch to using the source version instead. Which — fine. Not ideal, but technically within the rules. What stung more was their complete disinterest in any kind of professional support — even when we simply brought up the idea of a volume discount (!). They shut it down immediately. Apparently, sending satellites into orbit is easier than entertaining the thought of paying for open source support. And did they actually switch to the source? Of course not. They just kept going — now using personal Outlook addresses and incrementing the email handles like they were running a script.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
  it's astra isn't it? I had an internship there and it was pretty toxic. I could totally see them pulling this shit.
  - BonoboIO 1y ago
    I asked ChatGPT with search enabled and it pointed to the Swedish Space Corp
FactolSarin 1y ago
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?
ivewonyoung 1y ago
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.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
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.
- plam503711 1y ago
  Well, now I’ve seen it — and yes, lesson learned. But here’s the good news about humanity: they’re the only ones abusing it at this scale. So far, it seems most people still choose sanity over spreadsheets of throwaway emails.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Whenever someone asks "but who's gonna do that??" the real world answer is always "Well..." for better or worse ;)
- cogman10 1y ago
  We'd have to see the ToS, but I'd suspect the lawyer that wrote it didn't say email, they said individual. Further, I suspect there's a clause in there about commercial usage.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Then you need an explicit check box "I have read and accept the T&C" and those T&Cs allow you to block an account, which is often the most effective option against abusers. If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials. As things stand there is no point in going legal. Either let it slide or block them and use it for PR with a blog post and an HN submission (wait a minute ;)
    - cogman10 1y ago
josefx 1y ago
Tinfoil hat: The entire thing is just an ad. "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..."
- plam503711 1y ago
  It is not, but yeah, we also have NASA as customers. However, we do not chase specifically aerospace companies. We are simply an open source alternative to VMware. So doing an ad explaining how to literally git pull the product without even talking to anyone or giving your email to our sales would be a weird strategy :D
InsideOutSanta 1y ago
There aren't many aerospace companies with annual revenues of around $130 million and satellites in space. I'd guess it's Planet Labs.
- MarkusQ 1y ago
  Except that Planet Labs annual revenue is almost twice that, and has been for a while. So it's likely not them. No idea who it would be though.
- fohdeesha 1y ago
  it's not
nand_gate 1y ago
We're not going to waste days chasing them when we could waste days writing a blog post to advertise our product. 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.
- fohdeesha 1y ago
  ....have you seen how much code and work vates has contributed upstream to xen? It's more than citrix at this point IIRC. Everything they do gets pushed back to upstream projects so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
  - nand_gate 1y ago
    No, I don't follow legacy hypervisors but fair enough perhaps my initial impression was off-base... still you can appreciate the irony of complaining about Rocket Company getting free stuff :/

plam503711 1y ago

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.

adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
one option is to talk to their customers. the customers almost certainly don't know, and might be interested to know that their launch provider is possibly going to have some serious issues
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
TZubiri 1y ago
Just straight to court " it’s not worth the energy for now" Not sure what the amount is, but Small Claims is pretty straightforward and energy efficient? You can get like 10K depending on jurisdiction. The whole trial is like 1 hour.
- plam503711 1y ago
  We operate globally, and this company isn’t even on our continent. On top of that, it’s a semi state-operated entity — so you can probably imagine where any legal effort would end up: somewhere between bureaucratic limbo and /dev/null.
  - TZubiri 1y ago
    Ah I didn't consider that. International case certainly is going to be more complex. That said, I think that small cases are still worth pursuing on a matter of principle and strategy. It's better to practice pursuing payment from international clients when it's small amounts you don't care about, so that you are prepared if you have an issue with a huge client and bankruptcy is on the line.
casey2 1y ago
It sounds like you’re navigating a really difficult and emotionally draining situation—and I respect the restraint and clarity in how you’re approaching it.
bambax 1y ago
> publicly calling out the behavior > I’m still holding off on naming the company directly Does not compute. Why not name them?
- balls187 1y ago
  Lawsuits aren’t fun.
  - bambax 1y ago
    Aren't they? I sued a huge multinational company years ago, as an individual. People predicted the apocalypse. I won. It was lots of fun. (It was in France so the lawyers' fees weren't what they are in the US. But the way people advised me not to sue, was very similar.)
- chii 1y ago
  by declaring, but not acting yet, the OP gives the company an out, and allow a potential payday to come. After all, everybody is after money. Any action which seems strange or wild, when considered from the POV of making money, would start to sense.
- Philpax 1y ago
  Because as long as they don't name them, there's still a chance they'll pay up or self-host. As soon as they do name them, any chance of a meaningful business relationship will disappear.
  - hungryhobbit 1y ago
    Did you read how much work these people put into not paying? I think that ship has sailed long ago.
- mattmaroon 1y ago
  Because they could sue you. Even if the suit is baseless it’ll cost a lot to defend, and you might accidentally give them some basis in the process
russfink 1y ago
First, congrats on having a successful company and doing what you love (and employing others - a great feeling to know you are helping technical folks live their dream). Second, some thoughts. A. State in your policy that multiple trials are possible but may incur a rest period between activations for a “given company.” Even 5 days should be reasonable for honest folks but cause a pain point for dishonest ones. B. If you can add a license activation feature to your software, collect metrics when you present the license activation screen, and “bake in” the telemetry to your trial license key request. Things like CPU ID, hard drive serial numbers, TPM quotes, asset tag serial number. Use that telemetry to determine “given company.” The abusers are likely installing this on the same system over and over. C. Independent of the activation idea, If the trial hard-stops after 30 days, maybe you could delay the approval process on all new trials by X days (X randomly chosen from range 0..5, and all trial requests independent of requestor) and then activate the product for 30-X days. Assuming the dishonests have integrated the VM into their production systems, this will cause an unpredictable unavailability and trigger a pain point somewhere. At worst, it will cause them to step up their request efforts. As others probably are saying, this might be one for the lawyers.
- eb0la 1y ago
  I believe all options you suggest are more than OK, but. Why don't you limit the trial with some capacity limits? Say, 1000 vms for installation. Of course, you'll need to have two artifacts: one for paying customers, and a second one to non-paying ones.
1234letshaveatw 1y ago
I very much doubt the CEO is aware. It is much more likely that some person is doing this because that is what they have always done- they are coasting. Alternatively, it is some poor sap that is in over their head and just following some instructions the original jerk put together to keep things running. The CEO will prob hand you off to some director who is going to be annoyed that they were made out to look foolish and that they now have a task that the CEO is going to want regular status updates on.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
bsza 1y ago
Sad to hear this and I hope (some semblance of) justice will be served, but just to play the devil’s advocate: if you refuse to name them, how can we know you’re telling the truth and not just pulling a publicity stunt?
threeseed 1y ago
> There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it Why would you think that a CEO would involve himself in matters like this ? Especially given that whichever aerospace company it is would be far more concerned with issues like tariffs, geopolitics, recession risks etc than whether or not a company is using an open source versus a community edition of some forgettable infrastructure component. Also choosing to pursue legal action instead of simply blocking them from downloading more free trials seems childish and short sighted.
- plam503711 1y ago
  "forgettable infrastructure component": this is what runs their entire IT. We build both the hypervisor and the backup/orchestration for it. Our stack could kill their entire operations if it's down because $whatever. 4000 virtual machines running isn't just the print server or the coffee machine.
  - threeseed 1y ago
    No they run their entire IT. Not you. They can easily move to the hundreds of alternative platforms which do exactly the same thing.
    - plam503711 1y ago
      I'm not sure you are aware about the cost of migrating from one virtualization platform to another, especially when you have 4000 VMs. I can tell you it's not exactly easy, and that's even our business now (migrating from VMware to our stack). It's not like changing a light bulb.
  - Disposal8433 1y ago
    > 4000 virtual machines At that point I would have created some scripts to randomly reboot or fuck with their VMs. How long will you accept this? They won't pay ever.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Huh? Blocking them seems much more "actual fight" and disruptive than going for legal action. Legal action was invented to settle disputues without resorting to raw power.
Edman274 1y ago
If you don't do anything legally threatening, then you make it that much harder for every single OSS vendor to make money, because the precedent is getting established that there is no penalty for breaking the rules. When I was a teenager I would do super cut-rate work on computers for people, and my father did helpfully point out that undercharging for valuable work just makes it harder for people whose day job is to do the same work, because then they have to compete with a naive teenager. You're the kind hearted OSS / freemium vendor in this case. Threatening legal action costs nothing. Punishment is meant as a deterrent for antisocial behavior. Failing to even threaten them will result in less money going to people who deliver a public good.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > Threatening legal action costs nothing. Not really. If you want it to have teeth, then it should come under a lawyer's letterhead, and that usually costs something (probably not much, for one letter).
- threeseed 1y ago
  > Threatening legal action costs nothing It costs your reputation as a vendor which is permanent. You don't threaten legal action against companies before calmly advising them of the situation.
  - Edman274 1y ago
    There's no obligation to publicly reveal the threat of a lawsuit to a party that is abusing your license. In fact, if you don't reveal the existence of the lawsuit, the only way then that you'd gain that reputation is if the threatened party then publishes their threat, which they won't do if they straight up know that they're in the wrong, because then that damages their reputation. Why would a big company publish a blog about a small company suing them for blatantly violating their software license? They want that crap to go away. Get the money. Shaming a company doesn't make anyone any money unless they decide to voluntarily comply, which is what is being asked here. They're being asked to voluntarily do the right thing. If they were likely to voluntarily do the right thing, they would've done that first.
bmacho 1y ago
> We’re not rushing into legal action — it’s not worth the energy for now — but publicly calling out the behavior felt necessary. Wth. Why go public instead of just .. emailing them, and asking for payment?
- Kikawala 1y ago
  They did reach out. So we reached out. They vaguely apologized and claimed they’d switch to using the source version instead. Which — fine. Not ideal, but technically within the rules. What stung more was their complete disinterest in any kind of professional support — even when we simply brought up the idea of a volume discount (!). They shut it down immediately. Apparently, sending satellites into orbit is easier than entertaining the thought of paying for open source support. And did they actually switch to the source? Of course not. They just kept going — now using personal Outlook addresses and incrementing the email handles like they were running a script.
TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
it's astra isn't it? I had an internship there and it was pretty toxic. I could totally see them pulling this shit.
- BonoboIO 1y ago
  I asked ChatGPT with search enabled and it pointed to the Swedish Space Corp

FactolSarin 1y ago

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?

ivewonyoung 1y ago

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.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

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.

plam503711 1y ago
Well, now I’ve seen it — and yes, lesson learned. But here’s the good news about humanity: they’re the only ones abusing it at this scale. So far, it seems most people still choose sanity over spreadsheets of throwaway emails.
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  Whenever someone asks "but who's gonna do that??" the real world answer is always "Well..." for better or worse ;)
cogman10 1y ago
We'd have to see the ToS, but I'd suspect the lawyer that wrote it didn't say email, they said individual. Further, I suspect there's a clause in there about commercial usage.
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  Then you need an explicit check box "I have read and accept the T&C" and those T&Cs allow you to block an account, which is often the most effective option against abusers. If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials. As things stand there is no point in going legal. Either let it slide or block them and use it for PR with a blog post and an HN submission (wait a minute ;)
  - cogman10 1y ago

josefx 1y ago

Tinfoil hat: The entire thing is just an ad. "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..."

plam503711 1y ago
It is not, but yeah, we also have NASA as customers. However, we do not chase specifically aerospace companies. We are simply an open source alternative to VMware. So doing an ad explaining how to literally git pull the product without even talking to anyone or giving your email to our sales would be a weird strategy :D

InsideOutSanta 1y ago

There aren't many aerospace companies with annual revenues of around $130 million and satellites in space. I'd guess it's Planet Labs.

MarkusQ 1y ago
Except that Planet Labs annual revenue is almost twice that, and has been for a while. So it's likely not them. No idea who it would be though.
fohdeesha 1y ago
it's not

nand_gate 1y ago

We're not going to waste days chasing them when we could waste days writing a blog post to advertise our product. 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.

fohdeesha 1y ago
....have you seen how much code and work vates has contributed upstream to xen? It's more than citrix at this point IIRC. Everything they do gets pushed back to upstream projects so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
- nand_gate 1y ago
  No, I don't follow legacy hypervisors but fair enough perhaps my initial impression was off-base... still you can appreciate the irony of complaining about Rocket Company getting free stuff :/