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Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
51–60 of 148 posts
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#52The HN thread from when Travis's purchase by Idera (private equity) was announced, Jan 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 I had pretty much already learned that "bought by private equity" means "run away as fast as you can, they are going to gut it", and I suspected as much from the travis purchase... but I didn't take action, hoping it would not be true, and not wanting the work of moving projects a…
I mean, I expected this to happen, but with some amount of lead time. In this case they literally made the change the night before they announced it!
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while others are stuck re-implementing various stages, tasks and blah blah blah. Also an added bonus to this is having the full history of changes to the CI/CD process tracked in git. Can't those stages, tasks, etc. be specified in the CI specific config files of the repository? Specifying them via an UI seems horrible to me. At least Github actions is all file-specified (except for secrets).
It still requires conversion of config files and formats vs a script that is the same everywhere.
Yes, that's a valid point, and definitely a disadvantage. I was referring to the point that it's not tracked in git.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#54> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.
The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on so…
Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor.
Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading!
[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/
[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c1...
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#55> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.
The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on so…
Interesting. You put in work, Travis CI puts in work, but the surplus accrues to a third-party. Hmm. Unfortunate.
It's possible that most OSS won't have CI servers in the future. I don't imagine that's the end of the world but it does suck.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on so…
Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor. Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading! [0…
Ha, thanks so much! I'm trying (and having at least moderate success) to make it so I can devote half my weekly 'work' hours to pure OSS work, and the sponsorships are getting me close!
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#57> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.
The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on so…
Then your are in a position similar to Travis until now: offering a lot of value for free. You need to find a way to monetize the project(s). Only one of all those companies need to give 100 bucks a month to pay for the CI + extras.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
All three companies I worked for that ended up paying for a beefy Travis CI enterprise plan did so after getting hooked through the open source offering and wanting more concurrent runners and faster builds. Without that funnel, and knowing it's all integrated deeply in both GitLab and GitHub, I wonder where Travis CI could ever expect growth again... but that's probably not the end goal anymore, just milking the cur…
"that's probably not the end goal anymore, just milking the current paying clients and maintaining the status quo." Yep, that's private equity. I won't forget it again. If it makes less and less profit every year even that's probably fine, eventually they'll shut it down, as long as they made back a multiple of what they paid by that point, then it was a good investment. It's sad to me just as an engineer, that travi…
Yes, private equity hates recurring profits. Obviously.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#59I've been using Travis on a bunch of my opensource projects and was wondering why builds were getting queued for ~a day before they'd run, I guess I got my answer. :/ I don't really want to lock myself into GH actions (ideally, I wouldn't be on GH at all), does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying some money, but the almost $1K/year for Travis' lowest tier is about an order of magnitude m…
Sourcehut is something you might want to look at. It's modular, so you use what you use, and ignore the rest.
The CI they offer makes no assumptions about where your repos might live (git is git. Who cares who the host is), and offers the stuff you might need like secrets, ssh keys, etc. The images they supply for testing actually seem more extensive than the other players.
And if you really want to self-host it... Go ahead. The whole of sourcehut is open source and reasonably well documented. You can host your own build server with minimal fuss.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#60Thanks for this pointer, Jeff. I just spent some time adding another test in travis-ci on one of my projects, and this HN post got me to go in and set up the Github actions and badge. Side effect: The test ran in 1 minute on Github where Travis-CI took ~20.