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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

#101

Post by adament »

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.

I am not sure if it counts as providing a benefit to society but I think the Dell private equity process(taken private in 2013 and reintroduced to the public market in 2018) is generally considered a success from a business standpoint. As mentioned in sibling comments, a lot of private equity investments are an attempt to do something similar.

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

#102

Post by blihp »

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…

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 on it to begin with. Seriously, with all the OSS projects building workflows on Travis CI / Slack / GitHub (I'm talking about the non-git parts of it like issue management) / etc how do they think this will all end? Even YouTube is sending signals that the free ride (for unmonetizable content) will likely end.

OSS projects should not have dependencies on non-OSS infrastructure unless they are prepared for this eventuality. This has happened, in various forms, to most 'free as in beer' services given enough time. Companies typically provide the service as some combination of crush the competition / building goodwill / altruism / the prospect of eventual conversion of some small fraction of OSS projects to a paid version. The reasons tend to vary (in this case, new ownership) but eventually the bottom line tends to win out. Often you won't be given much time to transition when the free ride ends.

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

#104

Post by oldgradstudent »

smabie wrote: post #75
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.

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.

> Like everything else in finance, they do good by making their investors money.

During the financial crisis we saw that in finance, they do good by making their principals money. The investors can go F themselves if they're in the way.

Executives became dynastically rich by bankrupting their companies.

The heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG Financial Products, Dick Fuld and John Cassano are classic examples.

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

#105

Post by fy20 »

alpb wrote: post #98
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 G…

> done nothing so far but ruining Travis CI for the rest of the world but themselves

Don't forget the private equity firm and it's employees have a job to do as well - provide good returns on investments. That doesn't just benefit the wealthy, but if you have a pension fund (state or private) you are probably benefiting from it as well.

> Lesson of the story here: There’s nothing such as free, even if there is, it will not last forever.

In this economy, sadly no.

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

#106

Post by greggman3 »

When they had the previous announcement I switched my open source projects to GitHub actions.

I get that some people will not want more GitHub but I figured given all the configuration is open and checked into your repo someone will eventually make an open source clone that can read the same configs .

I also really like the way build scripts can be referenced by url/id such that I can just reference existing scripts made by other people. Super nice!

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

#108

Post by alexeldeib »

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.

Think of it more as part of a suite and it makes sense: host your code on GitHub, use actions to deploy them, and deploy them to Azure. Make up money on 2 from 1 and 3. Google cloudbuild has a free tier too. Looks like AWS Codebuild has a comparable free tier too (do people use that?)

(MS employee, not anything related to this though).

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

#109

Post by Symbiote »

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…

We were denied a renewal of JetBrains' software because we pay several people to work on our open source software.

We then realised we didn't need the license, as the community edition has everything we need.

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

#110

Post by Habbie »

charrondev wrote: post #83
aeyes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free accounts on CircleCI only have access to 2 core runners and can't run multiple jobs in parallel. Most open source projects I have seen on Travis do matrix builds which will take much longer to finish due to this restriction. Edit: Looks like you get 4 concurrent jobs if you register as an open source project.

We pay for CircleCI at $WORK and it’s pretty good. You get up to 40x concurrency in the “Pro” plans and I’m sure you could work whatever you need into enterprise. My biggest complaint has been it lacks an very useful built in ability that Travis had, which is automatically running your builds on the merge of your current branch and target branch. You can right a script to do it yourself, but there missing some enviro…

I can echo all of this - we also pay, we're very happy, the concurrency is nice (I believe they're bumping it to 80x soon - when my coworker asked "but what's the catch" I realised we pay by the CPU minute anyway so higher concurrency is a win for CircleCI -and- for US ;) ).

I've also hacked about the 'merge' problem but it's not entirely satisfying.

That all said, with GH actions currently being entirely free, and doing PRs better than CircleCI, we might shift our focus there.

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