That, and a lot of false positives.

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?

(Anecdotally) I don't think most big corps using commercial software without a license are doing it intentionally/maliciously at an organizational level. Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and not realizing it isn't free for commercial use.

Yea, this seems to be sort of analogous to companies who check whether you have a rooted device in order to take some kind of action (usually preventing the software from running). If that's a shitty thing to do, then this is, too.

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.

I don't think you will ever see this normalized, because it's a really dumb idea.

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.

How so? You think big corps would pressure corporate device management providers into making their services stealthier in order to avoid paying appropriate license fees for software that does this detection?

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.

I don't think so - most organisations and employees don't actively try to violate licenses, but if the path of least resistance is "eh" then individual employees definitely aren't going to bother. I bet there are thousands of people using the free version of MSVC commercially for example.

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.

You can already easily pirate the software by running it on your personal device for free, and the software would never know you were also working for a corporation that was supposed to buy a license.