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?
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
Yes. Your pain point is the level of support you are giving on good faith to these charlatans. Maybe add a clause to your license that you reserve the right to limit the amount of technical assistance on the free download. Outside of that, if I understand this matter correctly, most of your customers are honest and you’re willing to write off this one company in the interest of keeping your own corporate sanity.
Ignoring an OSS option is not the crux of the issue, it only adds more stupid to the cake. They don't deserve a place on the OSS hall of shame, but on the list of shysters and fraudsters.
A company is exploiting your free-trial offer, defrauding your project of resources even if it is only a buck and a half. Why are you sending them money? Just shut them down. Unless you have some really unfortunate wording in your TOS, there is nothing they can do. On Monday, send an e-mail to all accounts associated with $COMPANY and tell them in clear terms that you are going to terminate their free-trials COB EOW. Leave a special contact number to negotiate fees, wait for your phone to ring.
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.
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
They are detectable only if the issuer has a dedicated BIN for virtual cards. If they issue in the same BIN as your regular card, there's no way to detect without issuer cooperation, which would defeat the point.
If you also ban virtual and pre-paid cards it cuts this to almost zero.
There is a difference, this rocket company is not really going to generate a new virtual card every time? You think their business bank account even supports that?
> The company that developed and launched rockets in New Zealand and the United States, as well as spacecraft and software systems, made US$123 million revenue in the three months to the end of March.
4000 VMs doesn't imply 4k satellites, does it?
Regarding revenues, it may be correct if it is a specific division of SL.
Anyways, OneWeb has 130+ millions in annual revenues (and a fleet of 400+ satellites, which would result in 10 VMs per satellite <- fwiw).
I truly loved the way this article is written. To the point, sharp and quite comical. I certainly hope they achieve to clean the mess up.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes but the company in question has no motive to sue. They aren't named and any lawsuit would be completely fraught and easily dismissed. On top of that, they would be revealing themselves by suing. It gets more complicated if they are named and now have an actual reason.
Well, a lawsuit is a whole process. The system is designed to reject obviously frivolous lawsuits, while giving complainants some benefit of the doubt.
It is quite easy for your words to tip a “I’ll get whatever they throw at me tossed out quickly and easily” situation to a “I’ll have to spend a bunch of money fighting this” situation.
Legal risk. If the company decides to be a litigious prick about being named & shamed they might not win, but before losing they'll cost the product owner a pile of time and, at least temporarily, money.
Stating the errant company's industry and size gives us plenty of information to make an educated guess, without actually stating the name. I suspect that this action blocks any useful future relationship as much as direct naming would, so that risk has been taken, but I also assume that no such beneficial relationship was likely to happen anyway so doing this is worth it to get the publicity, both through the story and perhaps a little cheeky marketing down the road (“as used extensively by the famous company we won't name, but you can guess”).
One thing I would definitely do at this point, now the company knows they have been detected, is to try¹ make sure all support for that company is on the lowest priority possible. Absolute minimum response time 24 hours. 24 working hours, especially if the issue seems urgent to them. No responses beyond automated ones outside of normal business hours. Never try to guess: any missing information in a support query gets queried and the subsequent clarifying responses are subject to the same 24+ working hour latency. If anyone tries the “we are a big company, you should prioritise this” thing, respond with “With an email address like that? Yeah, nah.” or more directly “We know, a big company who knows it is massively in breach of our licence, and yet we are still generously responding to you at all.”.
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[1] They may of course have/find crafty ways to get around this too, but if they are determined to avoid doing the right thing at least make them work to avoid doing the right thing!
Because this is almost always just the fault of some low level engineer trying to save some time rather than some systemic issue at the heart of the company.
The company will just apologise and the CEO will make sure to tell everyone they know never to deal with this vendor ever again. IT is a very small world and reputations last a long time.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
> It costs your reputation as a vendor which is permanent.
You say that as if that is some bad thing. As a vendor you want to have a reputation for asking what you are fairly owed. The other option is to have a reputation for being a wet tissue anyone can walk through.
> You don't threaten legal action against companies before calmly advising them of the situation.
These are not incompatible with each other. Of course you calmly advise the company of the situation. 100%. You tell them that their 15 day trial period lapsed at <date> and that they continue using the <product> without proper license in place. You tell them where they can reach out to find the right licence for their needs. And you tell them that you intend to pursue them for damages if they remain out of compliance. All very calmly and professionally. Nobody is angry with anyone here. There is no bad blood. It is just a contracting oopsie!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
> If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials.
What silly "all or nothing" thinking.
You don't have to "go legal" on every free trial abuse, just the egregious ones. Here we have a company that's been abusing the free trial for 10 years and 1000s of instances. Vates rightfully can claim millions (~40M to be exact) from this instance. The company, in particular, can't claim they didn't know this wasn't allowed because they automated creating fake email accounts to abuse the situation.
It's particularly more egregious because Vates allows companies to build and maintain the software directly without support for free.
"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..."
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
....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
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
The both imply a similar lack of care to me. Like, not even being bothered to check the words, and if they make no sense just click the magic "generate image" button again, or fix them in photoshop or just erase them...
You're probably right in that they didn't really care if the header image was top quality. The codebase or security reviews, understandably, will have a different need for quality.
Thank you. I'm still not sure if this should be mentioned. On the one hand, I don't want to overly promote the tirreno, but on the other hand, when I see an issue such as trial abuse that could be easily resolved, I can't resist. My bad.
If you mention the product, even if it’s an absolutely perfect fit, you should definitely disclose the conflict of interest upfront.
This is not about overly promoting the product, it’s about making clear that you are promoting your product (or project, doesn’t even have to be a product).
chances are: checks it against a database of addresses it has seen before (e.g. because they were used to register stuff elsewhere). No such entry, or entries all younger than n days -> 'freshly registered'.
Sucks for people who don't use their addresses for just about anything.
It is not a healthy idea to prevent access to a trial solely because of a lack of reputation associated with an email. However, in this specific case, if there is a rotation of numbers at the end of the email, tirreno has rules that detect similar email patterns.
Additionally, I assume that registrations are coming from the same IP or network, which should make it simple to detect through platform.
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.
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!
Comparing it to the LLM's previous post on your blog, it's a little better - that one's got far more of the superfluous analogies and interrupting em-dashes. I honestly think you'd be better off posting your own writing put through DeepL than letting the LLM churn it into mediocrity.
LLMs don't have good "flow" either. Their signature style is full of clichés. Personally, I would prefer to read the quirky non-idiomatic structures of a foreign language speaker than something fixed by an LLM.
There's a certain sort of "snarkiness" that's very easy to spot. There's a convicted scammer named Craig Wright (long story) who uses ChatGPT to write long, smug essays on X which have the exact same sort of tone, complete with the weird florid analogies.
> 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.
> It’s tested. It updates with a single click. It saves time and reduces risk. That’s what we sell. And that’s what they keep pirouetting around with their email dance.
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
ChatGPT loves to do that artificial, inauthentic snark thing with me. Its style and tone are reflective of its reinforcement training.
I’d assert that unless it was specifically trained on my writing style, it is almost impossible to “prompt away” the tone it uses.
And that is the thing about authentic snark, it is crisp and edgy and unique. But LLM’s are trained in a way that would average out millions of different “snarks” so all of the attributes that make snark work go away.
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.
They run 4000 VMS as a stingy aerospace company so you can definitely assume less than a 100 physical machines.
Without further enterprise negotiations, it's 1800 per host/year. $180k max.
I don't blame Vates for refusing to chase down the company. They'll bring you way more pain as paying clients than the shameless theft they're perpetuating.
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).
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.
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.
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.
200 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadTo 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
A company is exploiting your free-trial offer, defrauding your project of resources even if it is only a buck and a half. Why are you sending them money? Just shut them down. Unless you have some really unfortunate wording in your TOS, there is nothing they can do. On Monday, send an e-mail to all accounts associated with $COMPANY and tell them in clear terms that you are going to terminate their free-trials COB EOW. Leave a special contact number to negotiate fees, wait for your phone to ring.
Seriously, why are you putting up with this?
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.
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.
There is a difference, this rocket company is not really going to generate a new virtual card every time? You think their business bank account even supports that?
Anything recurring will not take a virtual card or gift card in the US.
I got burned on this a couple times until I figured it out.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/companies/rocket-lab-rev...
And yeah:
> The company that developed and launched rockets in New Zealand and the United States, as well as spacecraft and software systems, made US$123 million revenue in the three months to the end of March.
I don't think it's Rocket Lab.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RKLB/rocket-lab-us...
I truly loved the way this article is written. To the point, sharp and quite comical. I certainly hope they achieve to clean the mess up.
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.
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.
" 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.
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.
> I’m still holding off on naming the company directly
Does not compute. Why not name them?
(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.)
It seems quite possible for it to just be less strong but more than nothing.
It is quite easy for your words to tip a “I’ll get whatever they throw at me tossed out quickly and easily” situation to a “I’ll have to spend a bunch of money fighting this” situation.
Legal risk. If the company decides to be a litigious prick about being named & shamed they might not win, but before losing they'll cost the product owner a pile of time and, at least temporarily, money.
Stating the errant company's industry and size gives us plenty of information to make an educated guess, without actually stating the name. I suspect that this action blocks any useful future relationship as much as direct naming would, so that risk has been taken, but I also assume that no such beneficial relationship was likely to happen anyway so doing this is worth it to get the publicity, both through the story and perhaps a little cheeky marketing down the road (“as used extensively by the famous company we won't name, but you can guess”).
One thing I would definitely do at this point, now the company knows they have been detected, is to try¹ make sure all support for that company is on the lowest priority possible. Absolute minimum response time 24 hours. 24 working hours, especially if the issue seems urgent to them. No responses beyond automated ones outside of normal business hours. Never try to guess: any missing information in a support query gets queried and the subsequent clarifying responses are subject to the same 24+ working hour latency. If anyone tries the “we are a big company, you should prioritise this” thing, respond with “With an email address like that? Yeah, nah.” or more directly “We know, a big company who knows it is massively in breach of our licence, and yet we are still generously responding to you at all.”.
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[1] They may of course have/find crafty ways to get around this too, but if they are determined to avoid doing the right thing at least make them work to avoid doing the right thing!
The company will just apologise and the CEO will make sure to tell everyone they know never to deal with this vendor ever again. IT is a very small world and reputations last a long time.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250508909866/en/Bla...
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.
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.
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.
They can easily move to the hundreds of alternative platforms which do exactly the same thing.
It's not like changing a light bulb.
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.
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.
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).
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.
You say that as if that is some bad thing. As a vendor you want to have a reputation for asking what you are fairly owed. The other option is to have a reputation for being a wet tissue anyone can walk through.
> You don't threaten legal action against companies before calmly advising them of the situation.
These are not incompatible with each other. Of course you calmly advise the company of the situation. 100%. You tell them that their 15 day trial period lapsed at <date> and that they continue using the <product> without proper license in place. You tell them where they can reach out to find the right licence for their needs. And you tell them that you intend to pursue them for damages if they remain out of compliance. All very calmly and professionally. Nobody is angry with anyone here. There is no bad blood. It is just a contracting oopsie!
They've never asked the company.
Instead you want to jump straight to legal action which is insane.
Read again my comment.
Wth. Why go public instead of just .. emailing them, and asking for payment?
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
What silly "all or nothing" thinking.
You don't have to "go legal" on every free trial abuse, just the egregious ones. Here we have a company that's been abusing the free trial for 10 years and 1000s of instances. Vates rightfully can claim millions (~40M to be exact) from this instance. The company, in particular, can't claim they didn't know this wasn't allowed because they automated creating fake email accounts to abuse the situation.
It's particularly more egregious because Vates allows companies to build and maintain the software directly without support for free.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"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..."
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.
VMware enterprise tier is probably 10x more expensive.
Job done.
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.
Unless your job involves critiquing the header image of people’s personal blogs I don’t think these are equivalent.
[0] https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno
(creator of tirreno)
This is not about overly promoting the product, it’s about making clear that you are promoting your product (or project, doesn’t even have to be a product).
How does it detect if an email account is freshly registered?
Sucks for people who don't use their addresses for just about anything.
Additionally, I assume that registrations are coming from the same IP or network, which should make it simple to detect through platform.
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.
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!
(I'm not a native speaker either)
> 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.
> It’s tested. It updates with a single click. It saves time and reduces risk. That’s what we sell. And that’s what they keep pirouetting around with their email dance.
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
I’d assert that unless it was specifically trained on my writing style, it is almost impossible to “prompt away” the tone it uses.
And that is the thing about authentic snark, it is crisp and edgy and unique. But LLM’s are trained in a way that would average out millions of different “snarks” so all of the attributes that make snark work go away.
Worst case, they just mysteriously stop using your product.
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.
Without further enterprise negotiations, it's 1800 per host/year. $180k max.
I don't blame Vates for refusing to chase down the company. They'll bring you way more pain as paying clients than the shameless theft they're perpetuating.
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).
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.
Once you get traction converting off free/basic tiers should be a no brainer.
We were on AWS Free Tier and once we hit market adoption, our costs were fully covered by paying customers (and then some…)
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.
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.
This won't go to court, the actions are indefensible. The only argument will be how much they have to pay the OPs company.
Why not do what most profit-conscious companies would do and just say "we notice unusual activity and.."