41–50 of 62 posts
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That's fine, there's no enforcement suggested though, maybe they get a popup asking about licenses, not necessarily a brick.
If it gets normalized for software to notice when there's MDM in play, do you really think it won't be treated as a strong signal and used to break things?
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>Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. Corporations cannot require you to have your personal devices be managed by them. If you're surrendering your own gear to a company, it stops being your own device.
But they can require things of devices connected to their wifi or being brought to their premises. You are welcome to leave the device at home if you don't want to consent.
Absolutely, it's their own network.
>being brought to their premises
Depends on the local laws. Where I live, they can either deal with it, or provide a secured storage space for the duration of the visit.
Either way, if a corporation wants their employees to use a device, they are obliged to make one available. Surrendering your private equipment to their management makes it not yours anymore.
This does not look like a technical or business decision, but rather a malicious function used to identify users (and/or their employers) for arbitrary reasons, under the guise of "licensing compliance."
[1] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-license?tab=readme-ov-fil...
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A lot of people use MDM for managing their kids devices (pinning DNS for filtering etc.)
First time I've seen "a lot of people" used to mean "practically nobody." Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.
Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.
Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?
You certainly can observe a correlation between a "corporate customer" and MDM/GPO and use that as a heuristic. But it's like relying on the color of the sky to determine temperature: "Is it grey? Well then it's obviously cold." It's a leaky abstraction.
It always seemed weird to me when people call shell binaries from the middle of a desktop app. What's wrong with finding the actual OS API instead?
There appear to be ulterior sociopolitical motives held by the author, which involve using the blanket term "genocide-friendly software" [1] to refer to anything OSI-licensed (implicitly suggesting all contributors to anything not using his homebrewed license are supporters of genocide?) This does not look like a technical or business decision, but rather a malicious function used to identify users (and/or their empl…
The next step wouldn't be anything crazy like "MDM detected, send invoice to corporate"; there are too many false positives. It's better to use the MDM profile information to filter out the larger corporate MDM providers (InTune etc.) and filter out school MDMs before taking any action.
Most software isn't important enough to pirate if the company in question needs to comply with certain standards (ISO etc.) where an auditor might catch such a popup and make it a problem. Plus, IT probably wants you to stop downloading freeware onto corporate devices anyway. Risking being slightly annoying to people with corporate devices may very well help more people than it hurts.
Most software license violations I've spotted were purely accidental, at least at the start. An (occasional?) popup saying "hey, you need a corporate license to use this product for business use" may be enough to scare people away from your software (ending the violation). Convincing someone with financial power to buy your software is harder than making people seek out an alternative, but at least your software is less likely to be used by freebooters.
Having a device enrolled in an MDM package does not make it a corporate device. Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. If I install a productivity or developer tool on my personal phone or laptop for personal non-corporate use I would get mistaken as a corporate user by this process. If you want to collect this information you should be clear about it and know and understand y…
>Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. Corporations cannot require you to have your personal devices be managed by them. If you're surrendering your own gear to a company, it stops being your own device.
Most employees tend to not care about the why and are happy to just do it making "you" (the one bucking the trend) the oddball. The one not being the team player. It's not legally required, and you won't be fired for it, but its strongly socially encouraged and that makes it mandatory for anyone not willing to put up that fight.
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First time I've seen "a lot of people" used to mean "practically nobody." Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.
I can't say much about the macOS market, but I do know that MDM-style APIs are practically the only way to write a third party control app for mobile devices. With the way Apple is moving macOS more and more towards their control, this may happen on the desktop in the future as well. Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.
For certain types of apps from the mac app store vs installed directly (mostly VPNs), they also have to use the MDM APIs and install profiles on the device to function.
So if a home user, for example, uses Tailscale and installed it via the mac app store, they'd flag as being MDM managed if the software used the code in the article.
Fonts on iPad work the same way, the font apps install an MDM profile to install the fonts on the device because Apple gates this behind that for some stupid reason.
Like you said, I suspect doing things through configuration/MDM profiles is going to become more and more common on desktop like it has on mobile.
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It sounds great from a sales and marketing perspective. Instead of convincing the guys with the wallets to shell something out. Just convince the devs to npm install solution, and then send an invoice. Win/win
Ah, the Oracle and Broadcom model - Java, Virtualbox, VMware, etc. Woe betide thee who doesn't notice the difference between Oracle Java and OpenJDK.