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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think the thrill of beating a system and getting away with is as much a factor as anything. And I get it.

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?

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/companies/rocket-lab-rev...

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.

> 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.

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.

[0] https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno

(creator of tirreno)

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?

God bless those among us who steal the candy bowl at Halloween.

So, is the company SpaceX or what?

0: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xKGeHuln08A

Arr, the use of "pirouetting" is such ticklingly brilliant punnage, mematey.

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.

Step 1: Modify OSS repository to gain control of satellites Step 2: ... Step 3: Profit!

EDIT

Change your terms to require any usage off planet specifically prohibited by the free trial license

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.

Why not do what most profit-conscious companies would do and just say "we notice unusual activity and.."

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).

Worst case, they just mysteriously stop using your product.

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.

“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.

Job done.

The worst they can do is not pay it.