Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 193 posts

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

#91

Post by LASR »

nn3 wrote: post #87

The question is how long the free party at github actions will last. That must be a considerable drain for github's Microsoft internal budget. I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.

Considering they spent over half a billion dollars on Marketing spend for Windows Phone 7, I think they can afford to support some CI actions for OSS.

Really it’s marketing spend for them to establish themselves as OSS-friendly. Nadella is just getting a lot more for the money than Ballmer did.

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

#92

Post by qchris »

geerlingguy wrote: post #6

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 help out as a maintainer for an open source machine learning group, and first learned about the switch in Travis CI's policy from your blog. Not too long after, the projects the groups repository owns all got switched over to Github Actions. I know that especially for folks that have many smaller projects, there's a lot of overhead in switching, but I really did appreciate your alerting people to the upcoming change through a different venue, as I'm sure it saved us some pain.

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

#93

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

This may be a bit sudden. But instead of heaping scorn on them, I just feel grateful for the millions they must have invested in OSS. It's unlikely they are out to hurt anybody. I'd guess the vast majority of people there, now and in the past, would love to be able to continue doing so.

So, if anyone can come up with the name for whoever bought them, a sale that was probably done with little alternatives already, then hate those peoples with all you got, got ahead[1].

But don't take it out on the people that helped you all those years. Not even if they screwed up the endgame by, maybe, being too optimistic for a week too long.

[1]: But not too many death threats, maybe. Even just for purely selfish reasons, one wouldn't want commitments to OSS become a poison pill that makes any company providing such services toxic to investors.

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

#94

Post by lmm »

neves wrote: post #58
rpdillon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was on Travis, and as soon as I saw that Travis was purchased by private equity, I knew the downward spiral had begun and I recommended we move to something else. Not surprised that this is happening a couple of years later...my understanding is that private equity will tend towards slowing/stopping development after acquisition to cut costs/headcount, and then squeeze the remaining value from wha…

Are there any evidence of private equity providing benefits for society? Sometimes it looks like they have a inverse Midas hand, everything they touch putrefy.

You're getting the cause and effect backwards. Private equity generally buys companies that are already in rough shape and tries to turn them into something profitable (which often means a lot of cost cutting). That's an important part of the ecosystem. If anyone's harming society it's the VC ecosystem that gets companies hooked on free money and encourages them to burn it as fast as possible, blocking sustainable businesses from playing in that space.

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

#95

Post by s-lambert »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #23
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 pa…

I have worked on many many open source projects. I don't think I have ever worked on any where there wasn't a single person writing code while getting paid by their employer. Is that enough to disqualify you from JetBrains criteria, do you think? In email from travis support it was expressed as: > Project must not be sponsored by a commercial company or organization (monetary or with employees paid to work on the pro…

If a company pays you to help maintain X then you can't use JetBrains but if your company lets you work on open source software, but not anything specific, during work hours then maybe you can still use it?

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

#97

Post by names_are_hard »

neves wrote: post #58
rpdillon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was on Travis, and as soon as I saw that Travis was purchased by private equity, I knew the downward spiral had begun and I recommended we move to something else. Not surprised that this is happening a couple of years later...my understanding is that private equity will tend towards slowing/stopping development after acquisition to cut costs/headcount, and then squeeze the remaining value from wha…

Are there any evidence of private equity providing benefits for society? Sometimes it looks like they have a inverse Midas hand, everything they touch putrefy.

There's this meme that private equity companies are vultures circling overhead looking for prey, and when they find a poor innocent victim they swoop in and destroy it. I worked at a PE firm in the past, and my understanding was that the companies we bought were all looking for buyers because they were already failing. So a company that would otherwise have to close looks to the PE markets for help. The PE firms say, ok - we'll buy you out and then we'll require you to change your business so that you become profitable. The stated goal was to buy a struggling business, fix it up, and then sell it a few years later. Didn't always work, obviously.

In any case, the failure starts with an unsustainable business model. Travis CI management set up a business that ultimately failed to the point where they needed to be rescued by a PE firm. If you want to complain, complain to Travis CI management. They're the ones who failed you. The alternative to the PE buyout was not Travis CI continuing as it had always been. It was Travis CI closing shop.

(I don't really know the details of the Travis buyout. Maybe there are other factors at play. In just giving a perspective on how these things often work. )

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

#98

Post by alpb »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #93

This may be a bit sudden. But instead of heaping scorn on them, I just feel grateful for the millions they must have invested in OSS. It's unlikely they are out to hurt anybody. I'd guess the vast majority of people there, now and in the past, would love to be able to continue doing so. So, if anyone can come up with the name for whoever bought them, a sale that was probably done with little alternatives already, the…

The original Travis CI GmbH, a German company, company is what the OSS community should be thankful for. They’ve been literally running build needs for at least half of GitHub.

However; I don’t think anyone needs to be grateful for Idera Inc, an American company, which has done nothing so far but ruining Travis CI for the rest of the world but themselves.

Thankfully the world has organically moved on to things like GitHub actions, but this personally will impact me as I have many repos out there that get 1 contrib/year, which would use maybe 2-3 minutes/yr. Lesson of the story here: There’s nothing such as free, even if there is, it will not last forever.

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

#99

Post by alien_ »

This is unfortunate and will cause a lot of migration work, and it was poorly communicated so I can understand the frustration but I'm thankful to Travis CI for their past services.

My project only needs about 30m of build time monthly and the migration to something else may cost me a few hours of work. At my hourly rate that may be significant enough, so for a while I would rather pay a small monthly fee to cover my limited needs.

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

#100

Post by throw_m239339 »

jdsully wrote: post #85
throw_m239339 wrote: post #81

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or whatever could have bought Travis in order to make it remain free. All these companies rely heavily on open source work thus open source project CI. None of them did. Well that's the result of all this. People are now moving to github actions, which are fine, but for how long github actions are going to be free for OSS projects as well? One cannot expect all these freebees to la…

Microsoft bought GitHub and offers github actions. No need for them to also buy Travis. If Microsoft buying Travis would have "saved" it, then why are you worried about GitHub actions' future?

> Microsoft bought GitHub and offers github actions. No need for them to also buy Travis. If Microsoft buying Travis would have "saved" it, then why are you worried about GitHub actions' future?

I don't know ... cause ending travis free CI is going to like... disrupt an entire ecosystem of OSS projects. Every single maintainer doesn't have the time to learn and set up github actions... Isn't that obvious?

Post reply on HN