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Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 193 posts

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#11
I just got an OSS project wired up using TravisCI. And during that process, I noticed OSS builds had a backlog of 5000+ jobs. It took sometimes 45 minutes for my build to process.

It's a shame. Something like this should exist, but I can't blame them for not wanting to do it for free.

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#12

Many people are saying to those of us who _haven't_, for one reason or another, gotten completely off of Travis CI, "the writing was on the wall" or "you can't expect free forever." And I think they're missing the gravity of the situation—there were (and are still) a _ton_ of OSS projects out there that are configured to use Travis CI for their testing and build pipelines, and it's not free to switch to something els…

When this was posted to HN a month ago [1] is actually when I learned it was going on -- I sure wouldn't have figured it out from travis' communications, even to this day. Up until my projects simply stopped building at all I guess.

Since then I have switched a bunch of projects over to Github Actions, fortunately they were all relatively simple enough to make that straightforward.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25003387

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#13
post #10

Many people are saying to those of us who _haven't_, for one reason or another, gotten completely off of Travis CI, "the writing was on the wall" or "you can't expect free forever." And I think they're missing the gravity of the situation—there were (and are still) a _ton_ of OSS projects out there that are configured to use Travis CI for their testing and build pipelines, and it's not free to switch to something els…

I honestly think this is the price that people pay for using proprietary software. The license terms changed and boom now you're out of service. If such OSS projects were running on Gitlab (either gitlab.com or selfhosted) then any of the members could have donated spare computing resources by running a gitlab runner on their prem. Many people have PCs running 24/7 and could spare a vm to lend to their favourite proj…

Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs with network access is a recipe for a bot net. Yes it’s doable but it’s not a magic wand to claim that an open platform will solve it.

The magic of Travis was that with a couple clicks of OAuth you were signed up and running builds for your own PRs. My first thought upon seeing this years ago was “How many people are using this to mine crypto?!“.

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#14

Only a few weeks ago they wrote a letter ( https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement ) that said "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Their home page at travis-ci.com still says: > Testing your open source projects is always 100% free! > Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that gives us so much as well. That is simply not what…

"including no company funds any part of it, including paying people to work on it(?!)"

JetBrains open source licenses have a similar restriction https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/

> Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees

> Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#15

Only a few weeks ago they wrote a letter ( https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement ) that said "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Their home page at travis-ci.com still says: > Testing your open source projects is always 100% free! > Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that gives us so much as well. That is simply not what…

>intentional manipulative dishonesty

I think it is more likely that there is intense internal conflict around this decision, and some people may be openly reaffirming their beliefs in the mission of TravisCI.

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#16
I long ago switched to CircleCI for all my builds-- it has free builds for both open source and private repositories with a simple (and comparatively inexpensive) pricing plan based on parallel builds with Windows, macOS and Linux build containers.

With Github Actions on the scene now, I don't see much reason to use Travis over one of the alternatives.

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#17

Many people are saying to those of us who _haven't_, for one reason or another, gotten completely off of Travis CI, "the writing was on the wall" or "you can't expect free forever." And I think they're missing the gravity of the situation—there were (and are still) a _ton_ of OSS projects out there that are configured to use Travis CI for their testing and build pipelines, and it's not free to switch to something els…

Are there GitHub CI integrations that offer payment integration, so that the submitter of the pull request can be charged for the costs of CI related to their pull request?

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to stem from the fact they killed off pretty much the entire engineering team after the acquisition (judging by tweets I remember reading shortly afterwards).

I will never again doubt what "purchase by private equity" means again, it is clear.

What exactly made you "doubt" this fact before now?

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#19
I've moved on back when Travis CI employees have started recommending to turn off secret filtering in Windows build logs as a workaround for a bug, then decided to turn the workaround into a fix, exposing secrets in the logs of all Windows builds.

https://travis-ci.community/t/current-known-issues-please-re...

https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1719

Re: Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

#20
post #13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think this is the price that people pay for using proprietary software. The license terms changed and boom now you're out of service. If such OSS projects were running on Gitlab (either gitlab.com or selfhosted) then any of the members could have donated spare computing resources by running a gitlab runner on their prem. Many people have PCs running 24/7 and could spare a vm to lend to their favourite proj…

Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs with network access is a recipe for a bot net. Yes it’s doable but it’s not a magic wand to claim that an open platform will solve it. The magic of Travis was that with a couple clicks of OAuth you were signed up and running builds for your own PRs. My first thought upon seeing this years ago was “ How many people are using this to mine crypto?! “.

> Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs

It's a bit more complicated than that.

I run gitlab and gitlab runners for a living, I can tell.

First thing first, you'd have to register a runner with a specific project. So no "arbitrary code".

Second thing, unless you can push a branch to the project main repository, no pipeline is ran. So for your own personal forks you'd either rely on gitlab.com-provided free minutes or you run your own runner (and tbh, it's fairly easy).

Last thing: you should not think of regular end-users. Think of middle to advanced users, that have a home server or something like that (homelabbers?).

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