Ground control to Major Trial

When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense. 🚀 Of trials and tribulations Open Source is beautiful. Messy, thankless, powerful — and occasionally just plain weird. At Vates, we’ve already shared some of the pain points that come with maintaining open source projects (see: OSS maintainer fatigue). And more recently, the rise of AI-assisted fake contributions and “security reports” has added a whole new layer of entropy. (this blog post captures it perfectly.) But today, we’re here for something a little more… grounded. 🧑‍🚀 The curious case of the infinite trial Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform. 🚀 You might say we’re mission critical. Fitting, since the XC ... Read full article.