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In their quest to have a child via fertility treatment, couples often travel to EU countries. The laws there are more liberal and the obstacles fewer. For single women, however, the story remains quite different.

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.

Are they paying customers?

No.

Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?

Also no.

Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.

But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.

It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:

As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.

When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.

Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.

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.

Are they paying customers?

No.

Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?

Also no.

Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.

But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.

It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:

As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.

When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.

Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.

• The U.S., the largest importer of wildlife products in the world, brings in nearly 10,000 species of plants and animals into the country legally, some of which have a high potential to become invasive species.
• A recent study assessed these imported species and identified 32 as having the highest risk for becoming invasive, posing threats to local ecosystems and to human health.
• These include venomous reptiles like puff adders and spitting cobras, and freshwater fish; similar species that have already established themselves as invasives have wrought havoc on native wildlife and caused widespread economic harm.
• The researchers say their findings can help authorities regulate the imports of such high-risk species and add them to watchlists to prevent them from becoming invasives.

I find it pretty irritating that websites don't put that they allow the free republication of their articles publicly. It's like why are they not proud of that!

The last example I noticed is Canary Media, basically if you saw their website they have almost no mention of that at all.

Till you notice one day this page: https://www.canarymedia.com/about/republish-our-stories

Why is this page not exposed more to the normal visitors who might like to support the libre culture more?