Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform.
Are they paying customers?
No.
Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?
Also no.
Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.
But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.
It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:
As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.
When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.
Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
486 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
70259 readers
4069 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
486
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not convinced. It all started from a license saying "if you want to distribute your version, you have to license it the same". One either plays by the rules or the modification doesn't see the light of day. And at the time of publication, it was rather radical stance
Freedom sometimes has to be enforced
This is not a story about a company denying free trial to another company because the latter is big. It's about the latter leeching resources from supporters who's money go towards the fleet that serves their 4k VM "trial"
It is against the spirit of FOSS
Vates is pretty chill, as is clear in the article. I think your point is well said, but Vates likes the "vibe" of FOSS, and is willing to take a bit on the chin to keep that energy internally. A bit of "turn the other cheek." They also clearly enjoyed the whimsy and just straight panache of being ripped off in this manner for a while. Their company is doing well and growing rapidly from an excellent product, so I doubt the money mattered much.
Well, even Jesus started kicking ass at one point with the money lenders. It looks like they are getting there now.