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> Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and realizing it's not free for commercial use.

And chances are, that company's IT department would love to know when that's happening so they can put a stop to it.

I work in ops, that's called "shadow IT" and it's a huge problem. It's really prevalent now because most SaaS is marketed toward individuals/small teams rather than marketing toward the business itself, so you get people within an org spinning up trials and free versions, putting company data into it with zero oversight, and often IT doesn't know about it until the quarterly budget review when they find out from accounting that it's been blown on software purchased outside of the IT org, now it's "critical" to operations and we're forced to onboard/support it.

Obviously these code snippets won't work for SaaS, but a notification pop-up along the lines of "We see you're on a company device. Please contact your IT administrator to proceed with your free trial" would be great, but would kill a big sales avenue.



It sounds great from a sales and marketing perspective.

Instead of convincing the guys with the wallets to shell something out. Just convince the devs to npm install solution, and then send an invoice.

Win/win


Ah, the Oracle and Broadcom model - Java, Virtualbox, VMware, etc.

Woe betide thee who doesn't notice the difference between Oracle Java and OpenJDK.


No joke. Oracle will (happily) sink your company in license fees and litigation if they so much as git a whiff of Oracle Java being used commercially, accidentally or not.


As a software dev, that looks good to me. Software devs need to get paid.


You have violated my license by replying to my comment. Pay me $10,000 or my lawyer will be in touch.

Obviously this is sarcasm. But what if it wasn't - would you think it was sensible? Comment writers need to get paid, so it's reasonable, yeah?

Part of Oracle's business model is tricking you into thinking you don't need to pay to use stuff, then extracting a much bigger payment in the resulting lawsuit.


Purchases should be consensual. Including the ones that pay for software devs.


I don't find this to be always the case, there's many relationships were the nature of work cannot be established beforehand and we have open accounts, if you ever received an invoice you were part of such an account.

The proposal is simple, if you ever need a service and you request it of me, I will send you an invoice. It is implied in the request of my service that I would get paid, absent any negotiation for payment, I will send my best estimation.

Similarly if you download my software, absent any license, I have the right to send you an invoice. The fact that there's a license that explicitly mentions this is a nail on the coffin on the part of Oracle, but even without it there's quantum meruit.


Oracle makes it very easy to hit by accident and charges way too much when it happens. It's bad behavior.

They are not charging based on benefit or use, or triple that.




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