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Ground control to Major Trial

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Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#131

Post by threeseed »

plam503711 wrote: post #117
threeseed wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it 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 c…

"forgettable infrastructure component": this is what runs their entire IT. We build both the hypervisor and the backup/orchestration for it. Our stack could kill their entire operations if it's down because $whatever. 4000 virtual machines running isn't just the print server or the coffee machine.

No they run their entire IT. Not you.

They can easily move to the hundreds of alternative platforms which do exactly the same thing.

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#134

Post by hocuspocus »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #124
c16 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1,800 on $130,000,000 a year sounds expensive? Company dinners/outings have almost certainly cost the business more.

The article mentions 4000, so 1800*4000 = 7.2 mil

4000 VMs, not hosts. More likely $3-400k a year before negotiating a volume discount.

VMware enterprise tier is probably 10x more expensive.

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#135

Post by kjellsbells »

OP says the offending company is quasi governmental aerospace. Sounds like a defense contractor.

There will be a security officer at such a company. If I was that officer, I would be profoundly unhappy that employees, whose job (by the nature of the company) regularly takes them into classified waters, were freely giving their personal gmails to a third party overseas. I mean, you just broadened the attack surface on the employees by tying them to their presence in the Google ecosystem. Yikes.

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#136

Post by plam503711 »

threeseed wrote: post #131
plam503711 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"forgettable infrastructure component": this is what runs their entire IT. We build both the hypervisor and the backup/orchestration for it. Our stack could kill their entire operations if it's down because $whatever. 4000 virtual machines running isn't just the print server or the coffee machine.

No they run their entire IT. Not you. They can easily move to the hundreds of alternative platforms which do exactly the same thing.

I'm not sure you are aware about the cost of migrating from one virtualization platform to another, especially when you have 4000 VMs. I can tell you it's not exactly easy, and that's even our business now (migrating from VMware to our stack).

It's not like changing a light bulb.

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#137

Post by koakuma-chan »

hocuspocus wrote: post #134
koakuma-chan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions 4000, so 1800*4000 = 7.2 mil

4000 VMs, not hosts. More likely $3-400k a year before negotiating a volume discount. VMware enterprise tier is probably 10x more expensive.

Oh I see

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#138

Post by Edman274 »

threeseed wrote: post #130
Edman274 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't do anything legally threatening, then you make it that much harder for every single OSS vendor to make money, because the precedent is getting established that there is no penalty for breaking the rules. 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 t…

> Threatening legal action costs nothing It costs your reputation as a vendor which is permanent. You don't threaten legal action against companies before calmly advising them of the situation.

There's no obligation to publicly reveal the threat of a lawsuit to a party that is abusing your license. In fact, if you don't reveal the existence of the lawsuit, the only way then that you'd gain that reputation is if the threatened party then publishes their threat, which they won't do if they straight up know that they're in the wrong, because then that damages their reputation. Why would a big company publish a blog about a small company suing them for blatantly violating their software license? They want that crap to go away. Get the money. Shaming a company doesn't make anyone any money unless they decide to voluntarily comply, which is what is being asked here. They're being asked to voluntarily do the right thing. If they were likely to voluntarily do the right thing, they would've done that first.

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#139

Post by d2bayes »

I can imagine the investors in this company would not be pleased with this kind of scrappy nonsense, especially given the industry.

> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.

It's likely that the CEO is not aware(...hopefully); it's a good idea to reach out to them asap. Do try and point out what's going on.

If anything, the sooner you reach out, you'll be doing the business (and whoever is backing it) a favor: trust has been misplaced. Somebody chose a very unprofessional path with what (one can assume) is a very critical system.

Re: Ground control to Major Trial

#140

Post by plam503711 »

nodesocket wrote: post #37

Is this the company behind xcp-ng? This looks like a completely different interface than XOA. First I’ve ever heard of Vates.

Vates is the company doing both XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, and now selling support for both in a single "bundle" called Vates VMS.
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