171–180 of 201 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> publicly calling out the behavior > I’m still holding off on naming the company directly Does not compute. Why not name them?
Because as long as they don't name them, there's still a chance they'll pay up or self-host. As soon as they do name them, any chance of a meaningful business relationship will disappear.
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…
Isar Aerospace has funding from NATO, for example :P
“Deceptive use against third party services by creating multiple email accounts to pretend to be multiple users of their service”
Because if you want to maintain a good reputation with people, you don’t facilitate people taking advantage of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's practically trivial to bypass this if you really want to. CapitalOne in the US allows you to have virtual cards that can be verified but you can delete and block at any time for free if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure the practice discourages casuals from gaming trials, but it just feels like it's making life miserable for paying customers but doing almost nothing to stop bad actors
If you also ban virtual and pre-paid cards it cuts this to almost zero. There is a difference, this rocket company is not really going to generate a new virtual card every time? You think their business bank account even supports that?
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.
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.
So, is the company SpaceX or what?
I think the most depressing thing is how unsurprising this is. This is why free trials require credit cards upfront, as they're more difficult to fake, not because you're about to be stealth billed. It's thanks to people like this.
it's practically trivial to bypass this if you really want to. CapitalOne in the US allows you to have virtual cards that can be verified but you can delete and block at any time for free if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure the practice discourages casuals from gaming trials, but it just feels like it's making life miserable for paying customers but doing almost nothing to stop bad actors
Anything recurring will not take a virtual card or gift card in the US.
I got burned on this a couple times until I figured it out.
It’s probably time to channel larry ellison and shake these guys down. Or at least shake their pockets for loose change. They are stealing from you. As you point out you go out of your way to help companies with your oss options: you’re way on the right side of principled and generous. this is abuse. Don’t put up with it. Given the history, I’d suggest a short C&D recounting the 10 years(!) of theft, the measures the…
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art. 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.
Genius marketing, I guess Rocket Company is supposed to be exploiting the OSS community, but who built Xen ;)
Before you soapbox on the 'open source moral contract' consider repaying the OSS works you gladly derived.
As CTO, I feel pretty strongly about this type of behavior and lie the blame squarely on the Aerospace Co’s CTO. Being scrappy early on is part of the job, but when you are starting to generate revenue it’s time to convert your free tiers to starter tiers as you scale. I’m sorry that there are people in our industry who choose to behave this way.
I agree 120% with you... ... but I am wondering about how good you are using free tiers. IMHO the free tier in cloud/saas just offsets the initial costs of using the cloud/saas. So... unless you're really small free tiers won't work for you.
Once you get traction converting off free/basic tiers should be a no brainer.
We were on AWS Free Tier and once we hit market adoption, our costs were fully covered by paying customers (and then some…)