Ground control to Major Trial

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

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.

To be fair to them - they've been doing it for 10 years without a problem!

Based on what I read, it sounds like they believe in their model and aren’t looking to come down on everyone because of one bad actor.

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.

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.

Seriously, why are you putting up with this?