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.
Vates spun up xcp-ng off the xen hypervisor and created a great “vsphere” like management plane called xen orchestra. Its a fantastic hypervisor with vsan/built in backups/etc. With vmware self immoliating after selling to Broadcom, they are an ideal stand in for vmwares primary product. Their licensing costs are wildly reasonable, even before the vmware debacle.
They have gone from “a guy” to a 100 person company in the last few years while sticking by the FOSS ethic entirely. You can build the project from source, or even grab a few github scripts that build it for you. They have always been open and clear about letting you build it and use it however you like.
They know how to cut this abusive behaviour off. They are fully capable. They don’t want to use those tools, legal or technical, because it goes against the spirit of FOSS, even if it’s to stop someone else who is abusing the spirit of FOSS.
Being good people, they are using “name and shame” first, and are even so kind as to leave the “name” part out for now. I expect that they may make some changes down the line if the org, and maybe others playing this same game, dont play nicer.
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
I don’t disagree with the want to license software like this. The downside then is a subset of “letting you build and use it any way you like” includes registering N trial accounts every 30 days. If this isn’t actually spelled out as illegal under the license, some jerkbag will do it. I wish we didn’t live in this world, but we do.