Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by nojvek » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

merijnv wrote: post #135

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 nice…

AFAIK GitHub isn’t losing money. They have a ton of enterprise users and that’s where the big money is. I could be wrong since they don’t publish the numbers. I wish GitHub IPOd and remained independent. Not a huge fan of Trillion dollar corps gulping everything that threatens them.

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

#172

Post by takluyver » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

brodock wrote: post #168

takluyver wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the better option? Should small OSS projects have lived without CI for the last few years? Or should everyone who publishes an OSS project set up and maintain a self-hosted CI service for it? Either option would be a massive drag on OSS development. It doesn't actually matter much for this if you use an OSS CI service like Gitlab: the hosted service is still dependent on the generosity/marketing of the compa…

migrating GitLab from "cloud" to self-hosted is as easy as importing the project. You can even import in batch and things will "just work". https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/gitlab_com.ht... hosting CI yourself is equally simple. The worker can be installed with few commands, and with a few extra you can configure autoscalling: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/

I'm talking about setting up the infrastructure before you get to either of those points. I don't want CI running on my laptop - especially for an open project where anyone can submit a merge request - and I don't have a server to use for it, let alone a private Gitlab instance ready to import projects to.

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

#173

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

takluyver wrote: post #162

blihp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people absolutely refuse to learn from history. The gravity of the situation is the same as it always is: OSS projects have created a hard dependency on a commercial 3rd party service because it was given to them for free. Free service is now going away and they're screwed because they have no plan 'B'. The issue isn't that they haven't gotten off of it already, it's that they likely never should have gotten…

What was the better option? Should small OSS projects have lived without CI for the last few years? Or should everyone who publishes an OSS project set up and maintain a self-hosted CI service for it? Either option would be a massive drag on OSS development. It doesn't actually matter much for this if you use an OSS CI service like Gitlab: the hosted service is still dependent on the generosity/marketing of the compa…

So, my experience as an OSS developer is indeed that I wouldn't have switched to CI in the first place if Travis hadn't existed.

I had heard of CI testing, and sure it sounded good, but we had all been making due without it, and I didn't have time (and certainly the projects didn't have money) to set it up. But travis made it so damn easy and free to turn on, there was no reason not to try it. Once tried, there was no going back, we would never want to do otherwise.

Travis really defined this market and opened up CI testing to entire communities. We owe them (employees, former management) a debt of gratitude for that.

But then we come to depend upon it for sure. Which they had no obligation to supply it forever, and perhaps it wasn't even sustainable business to do so. So now what? Well, now we move over to other free options like Github Actions which fortunately exist.

But is it dangerous to depend on the largesse of for-profit companies? FOR SURE.

Is it, at this point, hard to figure out how to do otherwise? FOR SURE.

So, what could we do instead? In my dream world, we'd have a non-profit collaborative project to provide CI to open source on an ability-to-pay basis. Is that likely? I dunno, raising money for open source is already a problem. And it's a hard project. As long as there are companies providing it to us for free, it's definitely less likely.

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

#174

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

eins1234 wrote: post #26

koolba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?! “.

> My first thought upon seeing this years ago was “How many people are using this to mine crypto?!“. Having worked at a Travis CI competitor that also offered open-source credits. The answer is "many" if you don't do anything about it...

Indeed, that is why Travis said they were changing the way they handled open source, because people were using it to mine crypto. They just weren't clear that the "change" was basically "not anymore providing free services to open source".

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

#175

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #159

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…

> 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 else (even though there are many adequate alternatives). Github Actions is free. I migrated some repos to Github Actions this year and the process is relatively painless. Also I do not expect Microsoft to turn off Github Actions for OSS pro…

What "rate limited budget"? As far as I could tell there were no limits to Github Actions open source free?

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

#176

Post by names_are_hard » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

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.

Agreed. When a service gets bought by a PE firm it's a bad sign. It's not the cause of trouble but a sure symptom.

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

#177

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #86

claytonjy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what kind of project would you use this in? I can see how this might combat a very specific type of abuse, but it seems like it'd be even more effective in deterring contributions entirely.

Any project where I as project operator cannot afford CI credits for the hundreds of pull requests people submit to me while presuming I can afford to provide them CI.

I think the number of people that would choose to pay for a PR to your project is small enough that you could probably just do it manually, and ask them to venmo/paypal/cashapp you money. You are probably not going to get very many.

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

#178

Post by takluyver » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #173

takluyver wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the better option? Should small OSS projects have lived without CI for the last few years? Or should everyone who publishes an OSS project set up and maintain a self-hosted CI service for it? Either option would be a massive drag on OSS development. It doesn't actually matter much for this if you use an OSS CI service like Gitlab: the hosted service is still dependent on the generosity/marketing of the compa…

So, my experience as an OSS developer is indeed that I wouldn't have switched to CI in the first place if Travis hadn't existed. I had heard of CI testing, and sure it sounded good, but we had all been making due without it, and I didn't have time (and certainly the projects didn't have money) to set it up. But travis made it so damn easy and free to turn on, there was no reason not to try it. Once tried, there was n…

If there was some big central fund to pay for CI for many open source projects, it would probably be for-profit companies donating much of the money to support that. Is that much different to for-profit companies making in-kind donations of free build time?

You might hope you'd get a broader pool of companies paying in to the fund, so you're less dependent on any one company. But unless the donors throw almost infinite money at you, you would soon need to make some kind of restrictions on which projects can benefit and how much they can use per month.

The best I can think of to do is to make your CI config a relatively simple wrapper around generic tools, so it's easy to move when you need to. This is often a trade-off with things like parallelism and caching, but at least if you know it's a trade-off you can make sensible decisions.

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

#179

Post by gt565k » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

I find it funny people are up in arms and complaining, out of all places, on HN, where start-up culture should be more prevalent and aware of the costs it takes to run a business and maintain its operational capacity.

Nothing is free. It might be free to you, but Travis CI has to pay for the compute resources to run your free builds.

At the end of the day, never build your product or infrastructure on free services without planning on eventually paying for it and budgeting for it.

If you want a full CI/CD pipeline, there's plenty of open source tools. You can run it on your own hardware, which is what most do for builds as it's cheaper, or incorporate AWS spot instances if you want to run at the lowest cloud compute cost.

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

#180

Post by jjeaff » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #57

wegs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason to make promises is that they are legally enforceable: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp 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.

> 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 don't think a promise to offer something free forever is necessarily binding unless there is consideration from the other party.

Pay a one time fee and get unlimited minutes forever, that would likely be binding.

But in this case, recipients of the freebie didn't have to offer anything to Travis in exchange.