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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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's not like changing a light bulb.
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!
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.
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.