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Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#111

Post by Znafon »

I don't understand this reaction and the reaction of many people in this thread. To me it looks like choosing beggars, maybe I'm missing something.

Travis-CI was giving a ton of computing power for free, no questions asked. That was incredibly generous but had certainly a gigantic cost and it powered many OSS projects for a long time.

Yet how can we complain that they can throw money around, some says that it will reduce the number of new users that discover the service and the number of paying client in the long run (many are saying this but are not paying users anyway) but it's not like the number of potential clients is unlimited anyway and at what point it becomes to costly to get the last ones.

Why would this be a "private equity" thing, you can't always loose (or invest to get more users) money. Does your company sponsors the infrastructure of that many OSS projects? Would it be willing to cover the costs of all servers used by OSS projects for Travis?

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#112

Post by user5994461 »

imroot wrote: post #62
TylerE wrote: post #22

While I have some sympathy. I also think that expecting travis-ci to effectively donate hours and hours of CPU time a month to endlessly run tests on hundreds on minor projects from one guy is exactly why this change happened. It's unsustainable.

This "one guy," if you will, is responsible for a majority of the ansible galaxy modules that are out there. Far from a bad actor just utilizing CPU time for pet projects, Jeff's code is probably in use in a large majority of companies that use Ansible, mine included.

Nitpicking here, the vast majority of companies that use Ansible do not use galaxy.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#113

Post by user5994461 »

Havoc wrote: post #95

But why move to another CI provide that will be under the same commercial pressures ultimately? (Handing out free compute is bad for profits). As someone pointed out here the other day. With build minutes as a concept they're inherently incentivized to keep old slow gear running as well. I reckon self-hosted gitlab is a good bet, but admittedly tricky for big FOSS projects that need to be public

Because it's easy to use, it works well, and when it doesn't there are 3 other competitors ready to take over.

Travis CI could shutdown overnight, there's Circle CI and AppVeyor doing the exact same thing. They take pretty much the same configuration so there's nothing to adjust.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#114

Post by MaKey »

schoen wrote: post #36
PebblesHD wrote: post #11

After some of the previous TOS changes, I finally found the motivation to move to a self-hosted CI on a VPS. I’ve been entirely satisfied since migrating, and it’s been a truly low touch experience. Not for everyone I’m sure but for the low cost of the VPS I’m getting my value out of it, certainly not proving to be a maintenance drain as I’d feared, just updating it on a CRON has served me well.

Are there good tools to help with this for people who are used to a hosted CI and want to replicate some of its features? (I'm just curious, I'm not in that situation myself.) Or is the cloud/SaaS instinct so pervasive now that very few people are trying to do what you're doing?

There is Concourse CI [0], which appears to be simple to set up.

[0] https://concourse-ci.org/

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#115

Post by mschuster91 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #19

Oh boy, I just moved my projects from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com after the builds stopped happening on .org. (Despite the travis FAQ that said "we’re making a number of changes to the travis-ci.org infrastructure to ensure the service will remain as reliable and available to you as it always has been until [it goes away Dec 31]", that was not the case, builds simply stopped working on .org. https://docs.travis-ci…

> I dunno, they managed to do it for 9 years, were they losing money the whole time?

Probably. Many "startups" these days are not profitable for years as they burn mountains of VC money to gain market share and drown out competitors.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#116

Post by takluyver »

yorwba wrote: post #92
jrochkind1 wrote: post #44

Travis has an FAQ whose URL says "open source repository migration", but whose on-page title says "Migrating repositories to travis-ci.com" Travis Staff accounts in the travis "community forum" were linking to this FAQ as recently as 9 days ago, which still at this moment contains a question: > Q. Will Travis CI be getting rid of free users? # > A. Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-sourc…

> They're providing an FAQ about "free accounts" without saying there no longer is no such thing as a free account, and "open source projects" are "joining private projects on travis-ci.com" only in the sense they can choose to pay for the same plans as private projects. https://travis-ci.com/plans Was the "free plan" added after you commented? > Free Plan > Free > - 10000 Credits > - Unlimited unique users > - Priva…

As a logged in user, that redirects to a settings page where you can choose your plan. A tooltip has some more detail for the free option:

> Free Plan is trial plan. The credits will not be replenished.

It's not clear if that's actually true - some people have had emails suggesting there are 1000 free credits (100 minutes on Linux) per month.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#117

Post by jpalomaki »

Znafon wrote: post #111

I don't understand this reaction and the reaction of many people in this thread. To me it looks like choosing beggars, maybe I'm missing something. Travis-CI was giving a ton of computing power for free, no questions asked. That was incredibly generous but had certainly a gigantic cost and it powered many OSS projects for a long time. Yet how can we complain that they can throw money around, some says that it will re…

Not sure if would work, but it might be worth trying to have some kind of "donate CI time for this project" button on the platform.

Could be onetime payment or a recurring donation (charged together with whatever payments you have for the platform).

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#118

Post by geerlingguy »

Seb-C wrote: post #99

What kind of monstrous CI process can take 4 weeks to migrate? I know from experience that CI takes a lot of time, but even the very worse one that I have worked so far (dozens of parallel runs on different machines and a thousand lines of yaml) only took me 3 days to migrate.

Each one takes a few minutes (even with automation doing the lion's share of the groundwork). I have migrated around 130 repos so far, and have somewhere between 40-50 left. Some of the last ones actually used more of Travis CI's environment features, so they'll take longer to migrate.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#119

Post by geerlingguy »

hannob wrote: post #86

It seems to me if it takes you many hours to migrate your project from one CI provider to another you're doing things wrong. Ultimately your .travis.yml file is a proprietary format for a service that you have no control over. You probably shouldn't have built your project's future on the assumption that it's always available. Ideally you should have your own testing infrastructure in scripts or test frameworks. And…

That's exactly how I have 95% of my travisfiles configured (15 or so lines to describe Travis config and install a couple deps, then '[testtool run]'. But I have over 200 projects to finish migrating.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#120

Post by geerlingguy »

physicsguy wrote: post #100

It's a real PITA isn't it. One thing I will say - I like the way that you've done your migration. I'm very wary of using defined actions written by GitHub or otherwise, because it seems to me that it leads to vendor lock in for CI.

Ditto, plus it's hard to lock in versions for specific 3rd party actions and keep them updated. You either get 'latest' and hope the 3rd party is trustworthy, or you have to enter in SHAs.
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