> 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 choosing to pursue legal action instead of simply blocking them from downloading more free trials seems childish and short sighted.
"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.
> 4000 virtual machines
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.
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.
Huh? Blocking them seems much more "actual fight" and disruptive than going for legal action. Legal action was invented to settle disputues without resorting to raw power.