plam503711

Vates is the company doing both XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, and now selling support for both in a single "bundle" called Vates VMS.

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.

It is not, but yeah, we also have NASA as customers. However, we do not chase specifically aerospace companies. We are simply an open source alternative to VMware. So doing an ad explaining how to literally git pull the product without even talking to anyone or giving your email to our sales would be a weird strategy :D

"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.

I'm open to discuss, please add me on LinkedIn :) (you can find it in the author icon at the end of the blog post)

Well, now I’ve seen it — and yes, lesson learned. But here’s the good news about humanity: they’re the only ones abusing it at this scale. So far, it seems most people still choose sanity over spreadsheets of throwaway emails.

We operate globally, and this company isn’t even on our continent. On top of that, it’s a semi state-operated entity — so you can probably imagine where any legal effort would end up: somewhere between bureaucratic limbo and /dev/null.

I first write my entire text and then after that I use a LLM to fix the grammar and have a better flow. I'm doing my best but I'm not a native US speaker. Before LLMs, people complained about the weird sentences or mistakes I made. Pick your poison ;)

Anyway, I'm doing my best to keep my own "signature" in writing, but it's really hard when you see a better phrasing generated on your original more limited vocabulary. But anyway, I'll do better next time, thanks for the feedback!

I’m actually considering reaching out directly to the CEO and telling the full story. But honestly? There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it. That’s part of what makes it so disappointing.

We’re not rushing into legal action — it’s not worth the energy for now — but publicly calling out the behavior felt necessary. It also sends a message to others in the ecosystem about the kind of nonsense OSS maintainers sometimes face.

And yes, while I’m still holding off on naming the company directly… I haven’t ruled it out.

You're absolutely right that businesses act within whatever constraints exist — and yes, we were a bit naive. We assumed that if someone had a fully functional, free, open source version available (well-documented and easy to install), nobody sane would go out of their way to abuse the trial system instead.

To be clear, it’s not just trial abuse — it’s actively ignoring the better, freer option in favor of repeatedly faking evaluations just to get the “easy mode.”

We’ll definitely tighten things up going forward. But in nearly a decade of doing this, they're the only ones to push it to this scale. So yeah, they've earned a spot in our open source hall of shame

Someone got the ref, finally ;)