Perhaps a bit of a stupid question but I've always wondered: how do companies that offer self deployed services like AeroFS or Github Entreprise avoid being hacked by dishonest customers to bypass their pricing plans limitations? Or is that simply not a concern?
People who want free stuff just use Dropbox or other free alternatives. People who use something like AeroFS generally do so because their stuff is important enough to pay money to maintain.
As someone who's trying to figure out this exact situation for one of our teams, I'm not going to try to pirate something and then try to maintain it. I want to be able to call someone and make them help me fix things. I want to know that I'm getting security updates on my appliance. If I wanted to do all that work myself then I would just build it myself from e.g. BitTorrent Sync.
Besides, the last thing you want as a corporation with data so sensitive you want to keep it in-house is to trust it to pirated, unsupported third-party software with no support and then have someone snitch on you and end up getting sued for some huge amount on top of that. Sure-fire way to get… well, fired.
You typically view your licensing schemes as keeping honest customers honest. Also, violating licensing terms like that is not something that any serious company does. All it takes is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on your hacking and the 1) IT manager is out of a job and 2) the company is going to have an unwinnable lawsuit on its hands. It's not a risk professionals take.
And it doesn't have to be a whistle-blower. It can also come up while you are trying to get support for a problem with the software. In the log files or something your colleague didn't know he shouldn't say.
The financial and the resource costs of pursuing a licensing violation in court are prohibitive. Especially when it's all based on he-said evidence from a pissed off employee. When BSA/Microsoft do this, it's a publicity stunt with long-term effects, and because of that they have a budget for that. For smaller companies (read - everyone else), the only practical option is to shame violators into compliance.
It's a small sample, but every instance I'm aware of has worked out in favor of the rights holder. Are you saying that infringed companies don't usually pursue the matter, or that they do and are unsuccessful?
My guess is that it's just not a problem worth investing in. They probably only made it somewhat difficult to hack, knowing 1) it's not worth the gain achieved is not really worth the time hacking 2) if someone does hack it, well they were never going to pay anyways... blocked.
