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Ground control to Major Trial
31–40 of 201 posts
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#32I got distracted a few paragraphs in by the realization that the text was AI-generated.
I first write my entire text and then after that I use a LLM to fix the grammar and have a better flow. I'm doing my best but I'm not a native US speaker. Before LLMs, people complained about the weird sentences or mistakes I made. Pick your poison ;)
Anyway, I'm doing my best to keep my own "signature" in writing, but it's really hard when you see a better phrasing generated on your original more limited vocabulary. But anyway, I'll do better next time, thanks for the feedback!
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#33Unhappy with AI generated contributions, but perfectly happy to have a big AI generated image at the top of their page, complete with spelling mistakes
One bothers people like you, one has the potential to waste people’s time and energy.
Unless your job involves critiquing the header image of people’s personal blogs I don’t think these are equivalent.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#34I used to work in IT in a large corporation back in the days. Amount of work necessary to procure software was so staggering, that any alternative "creative solution" would be much more preferable. And the worst thing is that the cheap software was the one that suffered most. The gazillion-dollar CISCO upgrade was no problem, it's already gazillion dollars. But to get $10 email shareware license one would spend many…
From the accounting perspective, it's likely to prevent accounts payable fraud.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#35> 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.
This is no way justifies this blatant illegal and immoral behavior, especially since the behavior seems excessive compared to what I state below but I have seen things like this tending to happen in places where it's next to impossible to get Accounting to pay or even renew anything on time before licenses for dev tools expire, rather than being an intentional way to save costs or "steal".
I've seen huge delays spanning months, and needing approvals from the very top, which you need to keep following up and makes the entire process a very painful experience.
Maybe it's by design to reduce costs but it happens even in places where the budget is overflowing and underused.
Payments won't happen until things are literally burning or production is about to go down tomorrow and the fear of the client getting super mad(that a relatively small payment couldn't be made in months) will drive some urgency. Sometimes not even then, so people are left with bad choices, let something terrible happen or make terrible workarounds like in the article. This results in a drive to only use free tools or make do with none.
I hope this results in better and easier accounting practices, which is probably ripe for disruption.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#36Honestly, just sue them. You could probably recover enough damages to subsidize the product for non profits or others for years.
Worst case, they just mysteriously stop using your product.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#37Is this the company behind xcp-ng? This looks like a completely different interface than XOA. First I’ve ever heard of Vates.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#38> 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.
Devil's advocate: If supplying an email address opens up a 30 day free trial, you can hardly complain when people do supply email addresses... especially when, to smooth the experience, there is absolutely nothing else but a email address field and a "start free trial" button.
People will always find ways to use things to the limit or abuse them. You need to consider where to put the limit to balance user experience vs. preventing abuse.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#39At my last job (a billion dollar company) someone had set up some kind of proxy where one free user account was used by ~100 employees. We wanted some more features they didn't offer so we looked at some of their competitors. I was in the meeting where we were going to decide to keep using what we had or use the better solution (in my opinion). Both were presented fairly except for the price. The plan was to continue the piracy, not paying what it should cost, or use the other service which would have been cheaper if done legally. I voiced my concern that if we are going to compare them we should at least compare them with their actual cost. No one shared my concern and they ended up with not switching a just continue pirating, even though money wasn't really an issue. The person who set this up wasn't in the company anymore, but I guess no one wanted to deal with this issue and decided it was easier to ignore it.
Re: Ground control to Major Trial
#40> 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.
I’m actually considering reaching out directly to the CEO and telling the full story. But honestly? There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it. That’s part of what makes it so disappointing. 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…
Just straight to court
" 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.