It seems like this makes things easier for everyone?
(And yeah, I know. That's a whole lot of software to never trust.)
What MDM is priced to make this scale reasonable?
But yeah generally it is better if you can do it.
If you want to collect this information you should be clear about it and know and understand your edge cases before you start attempting enforcement actions based on it if that is the intent.
In general in my experience, personal tools are a VERY hard market to sell into for corporate environments (I took a peek at what the software on OPs site requires a commercial license to use). I would bet most if not all of what you're catching here is unauthorized installs in a corporate environment and you're more likely to loose interested users than sell more commercial licenses.
Corporations cannot require you to have your personal devices be managed by them. If you're surrendering your own gear to a company, it stops being your own device.
acuozzo•3h ago
thewebguyd•3h ago
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?
radicaldreamer•2h ago
SoftTalker•47m ago
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.
radicaldreamer•9m ago
groby_b•2h ago
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.
layer8•2h ago
bootlooped•2h ago
layer8•1h ago
__jonas•2h ago
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.
ryandrake•2h ago
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.
p1necone•1h ago
thewebguyd•1h ago
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.
TZubiri•1h ago
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
immibis•1h ago
Woe betide thee who doesn't notice the difference between Oracle Java and OpenJDK.
immibis•1h ago
IshKebab•3m ago
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.