Ground control to Major Trial
virtualize.sh
When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense.

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.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    23 hours ago

    consider the following: they already don’t get money from them and also showing to wide audience that musk (and his people at spacex) idk who now is a inept penny-pinching scumbag can be a nice hobby

    • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      23 hours ago

      Wait this is SpaceX? I thought it was another company tbh, I was under the impression that SpaceX revenue was in the billion at this point.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        23 hours ago

        Pretty sure the 100s of millions was referring to back in 2015 or so when they started abusing the free trials.

        • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          7·
          23 hours ago

          I think any space company is semi governmental since they are all funded by the government. I dunno man, it seems like the authors intent to misdirect have been successful. We don’t know who the company in question is.

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            22 hours ago

            now that i’m thinking: would be 4000 VMs enough for spacex? maybe it is some smaller organization. i also take it is state-owned or similar, which narrows it down to a handful of countries that launch satellites

            and probably not government agency, because these would have people competent enough to do a git pull

    • youmaynotknow@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      23 hours ago

      Oh, absolutely, but it’s still an exercise in futility if the goal is to have any impact on the offending company’s demeanor and course of action.