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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#131

Post by dtech »

names_are_hard wrote: post #97
neves wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Doesn't change the fact that being bought by a PE firm is a very bad sign for customers of the business.

For something easily switchable like your favorite retail shop you can - and should if you don't want the collapse to hasten - continue as before, but for something your business depends on like CI it's a huge red flag that you should switch to a different supplier.

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

#132

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

newnamenewface wrote: post #78
smabie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like everything else in finance, they do good by making their investors money. These investors then can use the money for fulfilling their purpose/charter/business plan. For example, a school could use its endowment to give out scholarships, a pension fund pays out retirees, etc etc.

I would challenge the conceit that 'they do good by making their investors money.' They make their investors money, full-stop. Perhaps their investors choose to do good with that money, more likely, they choose to do business with that money. The private equity at no point ever did good through the act of making money, they did their job.

I think the thing here is that anyone can do good while making money- for instance, the longer-term PE groups mentioned around this thread that have respect from the companies they now own, or the factories that make sure that their employees are safe, paid well, and allow a work/life balance, or the finance companies that donate to charities and the like. The issue is that when money becomes the primary motivator for getting out of bed in the morning- and ethos and pathos get thrown out of the window entirely- you get companies who don't care about their employee's well-being or who don't care about the people on the other end of the line.

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

#133

Post by ergocoder »

dtech wrote: post #131
names_are_hard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Doesn't change the fact that being bought by a PE firm is a very bad sign for customers of the business. For something easily switchable like your favorite retail shop you can - and should if you don't want the collapse to hasten - continue as before, but for something your business depends on like CI it's a huge red flag that you should switch to a different supplier.

> Doesn't change the fact that being bought by a PE firm is a very bad sign for customers of the business.

Is it worse than company collapsing though?

With that, you might not even have a warning sign.

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

#134

Post by Shish2k »

koolba wrote: post #82
dessant wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unexpected behavior caused by any bug could print the variable to the build log, there is no need for malicious code to end up with compromised secrets.

Malicious code could also print the ROT13, hex, base64, or even selectively fail tests so that every failure is a bit of entropy. Filtering secrets from logs only protects accidentally dumping your environment to a log Because you left in an echo $SECRET . It doesn’t stop a determined attacker who can run arbitrary code.

If a feature protects against accidents, why should “but a determined attacker can work around it” stop one from using that feature?

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

#135

Post by merijnv »

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.

> I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.

Honestly, I don't really think so. I think MS's goal for GitHub is to be a "loss leader" to keep developer mindshare. They lost a lot of developer mindshare to linux, open source, etc. in the migration to the web and cloud.

Providing GitHub and CI for free to open source/students is a great way to keep developer mindshare. Make sure it's nicely integrate into Azure cloud for deployment and devops and you have a streamlined pipeline of leading large numbers of developers to your cloud platform.

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

#136

Post by chubot »

tome wrote: post #118

If CI builds were defined in a programming language that provided clear semantics, abstraction and modularity then porting to a new build host would be 10x easier. It would be an "annoying" or "fiddly" level of work rather than a time sink costing hours and hours.

Yup, that's where I want to take the Oil shell:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25340456

Continuous builds are already written in YAML + shell. Platforms like Github Actions and Travis CI basically use YAML as a really bad syntax for shell scripts (with their own if statements!), and then embed more shell as strings.

So Oil should basically generate JSON like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945449

and allow you to embed unevaluated (but parsed) literal shell blocks. So I'm adding the missing "declarative" part to shell. That alone gets you pretty far.

Although there are some more language semantics that most builds need, like coarse-grained dependencies, ephemeral or persistent state, etc.

gg is a related "multi cloud" system that's very interesting:

https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg

I'm writing a blog post about this right now!

----

An improved shell is the natural language for this problem because shell is for gluing tasks together. It's the language of heterogeneity. I view Make as a form of shell with dependencies, and Make has already been parallelized and distributed by many systems going back many years.

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

#137

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #71
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I started an organization which was taken over in a rather hostile way, I was very careful to make a bunch of legally-binding promises before the takeover happened, to help prevent it from becoming too evil. I'm glad you had the presence of mind to do this and I'd be interested to hear your hostile takeover story. Thanks in advance.

I'd love to hear that story as well, and the nature of the legally binding promises you managed to make.

It's probably too soon. Over the course of my career, I've encountered a significant number of really juicy stories that I tend not to explain, as there's a lot to lose and not very much to gain.

Traditionally, the purpose of autobiography is to tell all of these stories.

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

#139

Post by gspr »

Uehreka wrote: post #35
jrochkind1 wrote: post #8

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…

I wonder how many people start out making pledges like that because they wish other companies would and they want to be the change they wish to see in the world. And they don’t realize that taking investor money means you no longer have the power to keep your promises even if you want to because you’re promising with other people’s money.

It's no excuse not to be honest though. Just say "we made a promise that we won't be able to keep anymore, sorry".

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

#140

Post by olalonde »

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q

It's possible that the CI market is just too competitive today and that resources allocated to Travis CI, including developer time, would be better spent elsewhere.

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