Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?
People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc.
On the flip side, you are also missing all of the solopreneurs using your software for commercial use but obviously aren't spinning up a whole endpoint IT infrastructure to manage their own single device. Or contractors doing BYOD without MDM enrollment. Or small businesses/startups that are mostly BYOD, or don't do any kind of endpoint/device management...
So who are you going to catch, really?
Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.
Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.
For certain types of apps from the mac app store vs installed directly (mostly VPNs), they also have to use the MDM APIs and install profiles on the device to function.
So if a home user, for example, uses Tailscale and installed it via the mac app store, they'd flag as being MDM managed if the software used the code in the article.
Fonts on iPad work the same way, the font apps install an MDM profile to install the fonts on the device because Apple gates this behind that for some stupid reason.
Like you said, I suspect doing things through configuration/MDM profiles is going to become more and more common on desktop like it has on mobile.
That's a tiny minority of your user base. You'll live. They'll live.
> So who are you going to catch, really?
Enterprises that are big enough to manage their fleet, but small enough to not enforce rules. Which is a good chunk of money.
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.
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
Woe betide thee who doesn't notice the difference between Oracle Java and OpenJDK.
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.
They are not charging based on benefit or use, or triple that.
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.
Software should not be in the business of trying to (badly) guess whether the user is the right sort of user, based on inexact signals from the operating system. As others pointed out, the false positives will be annoyed, and the true positives will sidestep your efforts.
You certainly can observe a correlation between a "corporate customer" and MDM/GPO and use that as a heuristic. But it's like relying on the color of the sky to determine temperature: "Is it grey? Well then it's obviously cold." It's a leaky abstraction.
I'd always assume the worst of corporations but I think it's a little far fetched, probably doesn't affect their bottom line to just pay for the software.
Depending on what action you take with this, I'd say it has a pretty good chance of tipping people into emailing IT to get a license.