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TL;DR
Instead of paying to the company behind XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra or opting for the self-manage open source version, a million-dollar company opted to create dummy accounts to exploit the 30-day trial policy for 10 years.
Open source projects are no stranger to organizations taking advantage of their offerings without any form of appreciation, support, or endorsement of any kind. This phenomenon is widely recognized as the “free-rider problem”, where individuals or organizations benefit from open source software without contributing in any meaningful capacity.
A recent revelation by Olivier Lambert, CEO of Vates and the creator of Xen Orchestra and XCP-ng, shows how low some organizations can go when they are focused on cutting costs while completely disregarding the efforts of open source developers.
A $130M Cheapskate: What the Heck?
Referred to as a semi-governmental organization of around $130 million in revenue that deals in building expensive space doodads, the unnamed organization is said to be running hundreds of physical hosts and nearly 4,000 virtual machines, with most of their IT stack running on Xen Orchestra.
Like many other open source software, Xen Orchestra offers managed services for a fee. So anyone who wants to use Xen Orchestra has two options: they download the open source version and host and manage everything on their own. Or, they pay a fee to Xen Orchestra and get full support from them.
Instead of opting for the self-hostable, fully open source Xen Orchestra and setting it up themselves, this organization has been abusing the free 30-day trial (formerly 15 days) for over a decade.
In the past, the Vates team has reached out to the offending organization, offering them support for their issues, and even spent nearly a full day assisting them during their early “we’re just testing, maybe planning to buy” phase.
But over time, it became clear that this organization wasn’t interested in a proper commitment, only in exploiting the free trial to avoid paying for the software.
Any Guesses on What’s Happening?
A Redditor’s theory on what could be happening caught my eye. They speculate that someone from the unnamed organization created a script a long time ago, but they left, and no one in the current pool of employees knows how to work it.
So, rather than risk breaking anything or paying for a license, they’re happy abusing Xen Orchestra’s free trial.
Even Olivier suspects that they are probably running some script to automate the creation of new trials with phony email IDs. But to use their organization’s name in every new trial account they make? How shameless and ignorant can they be?
Anyway, we don’t know exactly who did this, but if anyone from their team or management is reading, it’s time to clean up your act. 🙂
💬 Which organization do you think is involved in this cheapskate behavior? Let me know in the comments below!
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