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

214 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

draw_down 6y ago
> I just spent the past 6 hours migrating some of my open source projects from Travis CI to GitHub Actions Man. Sounds like my personal hell. I’ll never understand how people motivate themselves to run projects. When I think about it I just envision doing a bunch of crap like that, dealing with issues people file, etc etc. No thank you.
jfim 6y ago
Pretty much any time there's an acquisition of a company, followed by a firing of a significant fraction of the engineering staff, one should run away from it. Sucks though for Travis CI users, I used it in the past and it worked well.
- deleted 6y ago
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tasogare 6y ago
> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.
- lykr0n 6y ago
  This. If I had a cloud hosted CI tool, I would gladly allow open source projects to use it. But they would be lowest priority and there would be limitations on how often builds could happen and/or volume of contributions. Large corporate backed opensource projects should absolutely be paying for tools like Travis CI. Just because it's open source doesn't mean there isn't money floating around. It's not super hard to rent a VPS or Physical Server somewhere and spend a few hours setting up <insert ci tool of your choice).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    It's not the setting it up that's preventing someone like me from self-hosting these kinds of tools. It's the maintenance, security, accessibility, etc. More time on all that (or risking hacks and having more downtime) equals less time actually working on the projects being tested.
- azdle 6y ago
  Well, their lowest paid tier is $69/month. I dunno about you, but that's way more than I can justify spending to be able to support doing work for free. If they had a $50/year or so plan that just restored the previous open source plan, I'd be more willing to consider something like that, but >$800 a year puts it firmly out of my price bracket for what it offers me.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    This. I am willing to pay but there's no way I can spend my yearly "save for a new laptop every couple years" budget on one SaaS for projects that generally contribute $0.00 to my bottom line.
    - rleigh 6y ago
      This is why I use GitLab with self-hosted runners for all sorts of esoteric platforms, then use their linux runners for the basics. I don't like to freeload, so I do have a Bronze subscription which includes a certain number of monthly CI minutes for private projects, as mentioned here: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/09/01/ci-minutes-update-free-users/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/09/01/ci-minutes-upda.... But I rarely make use of it. Also note that there are special arrangements for Open Source projects. I can totally understand limiting the number of minutes available. It must cost an absolute fortune, and having it unbounded makes it easy to abuse. Having to pay makes developers have to consider if they really need to go overboard on huge build matrices and limit themselves to something reasonable. Likewise for constraining the amount of network traffic. If you don't want to blow your budget, then self-hosting is an obvious and easy choice.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on some form of marketing to build up some kind of financial support (tip jars, Patreon, etc), but the pricing for Travis is astronomical for non-enterprise usage. But as I said in the post, I'm grateful for what I got for the 8 years I had it. And I'm happy that GitHub/MS is now running with that gauntlet.
  - mtlynch 6y ago
    Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor. Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading! [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c18aedc46415785853848ddf6de9d372ed490/meta/main.yml#L36L82 https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c1...
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      Ha, thanks so much! I'm trying (and having at least moderate success) to make it so I can devote half my weekly 'work' hours to pure OSS work, and the sponsorships are getting me close!
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Interesting. You put in work, Travis CI puts in work, but the surplus accrues to a third-party. Hmm. Unfortunate. It's possible that most OSS won't have CI servers in the future. I don't imagine that's the end of the world but it does suck.
  - tasogare 6y ago
f311a 6y ago
I think everyone should move from Travis CI, especially private repos. Idera bought the project that has no future, and it wants to get the money back. It won't get any better. Idera has fired a lot of Travis CI engineers, and your private repositories are now at risk. They can save some extra money on security.
ishcheklein 6y ago
We had been paying ~$500/month for the open-source project (https://dvc.org https://dvc.org) even before this new pricing model, and migrated to GitHub Actions recently- works like a charm. The only issue that we have now is Windows builds- machines on GH have a bit less resources, but it's good for us to optimize it anyway.
sounds 6y ago
Hey Jeff, This is hitting me hard, too. I hope this is the right moment for me to pipe up and say this: I always just do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run. I am grateful for the free minutes they offer open source projects - but any of the deeper integrations, the advanced automation? No, thanks. It's not like the other developers who use what I write have any more motivation than I do. No one wants to learn the custom setup steps, not even for the "biggest" of the bunch. (Is that still Github? Who knows? I don't.) Oh, and if or when I migrate away from a CI system, like right now... Good thing I just kept it simple, you know? Even for builds that target Windows, I just run a shell script. I get it that Node and Rust builds really benefit from the advanced features. Anyone care to comment - is it as portable as a shell script?
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  I don’t think either of them really “benefit from the advanced features” any more than any other language. Also, both have builds that are generally more cross platform than a shell script, given that they’re native on all platforms, and shell is not.
- monkeybutton 6y ago
  >do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run This. 100%. Where I'm working is migrating from Bamboo to Jenkins. For my team the new process is just calling "./build-test $params" while others are stuck re-implementing various stages, tasks and blah blah blah. Also an added bonus to this is having the full history of changes to the CI/CD process tracked in git.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    I call mine make.sh. Now get off my lawn!
    - monkeybutton 6y ago
      Hey! I started with C projects and make scripts and I long for the simplicity of those days! Obtuse web front ends, bunches of build server pools segregated by random capabilities, job queues clogged by competing developer teams and on and on is no fun.
azdle 6y ago
I've been using Travis on a bunch of my opensource projects and was wondering why builds were getting queued for ~a day before they'd run, I guess I got my answer. :/ I don't really want to lock myself into GH actions (ideally, I wouldn't be on GH at all), does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying some money, but the almost $1K/year for Travis' lowest tier is about an order of magnitude more than I can justify. I've also got plenty of compute laying around if anyone has suggestions for something self-hosted.
- rochak 6y ago
  Have you looked into CircleCI?
  - azdle 6y ago
    I've used it in the past, but when they finally killed off the 1.0 builders (?) my company went to an "internally" hosted Jenkins[1] server and I haven't played with any of the 2.0 stuff. Have you? How do you find working with it? [1] I did also ask about selfhosted stuff, but I'm not willing to host Jenkins for myself. I've heard nothing but complaints about managing a Jenkins install. It's been fine as a user (if a bit confusing), but I really don't want to admin it.
    - vosper 6y ago
      Not the person you're asking, but we use CircleCI, and it's fine. The YAML config language is okay, it gets the job done and hasn't been horrible to maintain or modify. Though we only have a few steps in each. My current gripe is that there doesn't seem to be any way to declare that one pipeline depends on another, though I may just be missing something in the docs. What I'm trying to do is have my front-end feature branch builds run against the build of matching back-end branch, but there doesn't seem a way to declare "this build should depends on the output artifact of that build". I don't really want to have to wire it up myself using their API.
      - driverdan 6y ago
PebblesHD 6y ago
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.
- schoen 6y ago
  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?
  - PebblesHD 6y ago
    If you’re comfortable with AWS or any other VPS provider, there are Ansible and Docker flavours of most common tools. I’m a fan of Jenkins but the competition also offers some well defined pathways to get this going easily, and all of them offer a somewhat similar way to define builds automatically in code. My go-to is the github org scanner plugin that can watch for new repos with a Jenkinsfile, and will happily manage creating the automatic commit hooks if a new one is found giving you a very similar level of ‘magic’ integration to what the SaaS tools offer.
  - MaKey 6y ago
    There is Concourse CI [0], which appears to be simple to set up. [0] https://concourse-ci.org/ https://concourse-ci.org/
jrochkind1 6y ago
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.com/user/migrate/open-source-repository-migration#frequently-asked-questions https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-reposito...) I actually had not seen that announcement at all, this is the first I'm seeing it. So I'm in the same position as OP, I maybe should not have spent time migrating my projects to travis-ci.com. Although I guess this buys me a bit of time to move to github actions instead. Travis is the reason that many people DO CI at all, in my experience. They made it so easy -- and free for open source -- that there was no reason NOT to do it. Then once you see the value of it, you are hooked, you can't do without it. But I think the number of projects doing CI (open source and not) skyrocketed because of travis. Prior to travis's entry on the scene, CI was not nearly as universal as it is now. So to say that offering free CI to open source is "unsustainable".... I dunno, they managed to do it for 9 years, were they losing money the whole time? I think the free service for open source literally created the market. Or expanded it exponentially. It was the first exposure a lot of people had to CI, and they took that first step because it was so easy and free. And now we're hooked. If there weren't other free alternatives like Github Actions, I don't know what open source would do... we all know we can't develop this stuff without CI, but so many open source projects simply don't have a budget for it.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  All three companies I worked for that ended up paying for a beefy Travis CI enterprise plan did so after getting hooked through the open source offering and wanting more concurrent runners and faster builds. Without that funnel, and knowing it's all integrated deeply in both GitLab and GitHub, I wonder where Travis CI could ever expect growth again... but that's probably not the end goal anymore, just milking the current paying clients and maintaining the status quo.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
rosineygp 6y ago
I had to change CI many times. From jenkins to gitlab... From travis to github actions... So I build this small project that helps me to change faster without touch in real CI logic. https://github.com/rosineygp/mkdkr https://github.com/rosineygp/mkdkr I think your problem is bigger than mine, but this kind of approach can help you in the future.
weka 6y ago
Not surprised. Travis CI is owned by Idera, Inc. who also own Sencha who make Ext.js -- a pay-to-use JavaScript framework. First thing they did when Idera, Inc. bought Travis CI? They gutted the Travis CI team.
- segmondy 6y ago
  That's Idera, if they buy anything you use, run!. Private Equity is all about milking the cow till the cow dies.
- vosper 6y ago
  > who also own Sencha who make Ext.js -- a pay-to-use JavaScript framework. I pity anyone who's paying for Ext.js (self-described as "The Best JavaScript Framework In The World"). That is some ancient shit right there. They must have some poor sods who're really, truly, stuck if they're managing to get people to pay for it. I guess at least you get support in your quagmire. But good luck finding quality developers who want to work on an Ext.js project...
  - Joeri 6y ago
    I worked with extjs 2 and 3 for years and honestly productivity was as high or higher than angular or react. It was a game changer and allowed us to build things an order of magnitude faster than before. I really liked it. What it lacked was a good responsiveness story, and by the time they added that I was already gone, first to backbone and later to angular and react. The amount of vendor lock-in of Extjs is massive though. It had its own JSX-like pseudolanguage for describing UI that was impossible to port to anything else. Moving away meant a total rewrite.
    - mike22 6y ago
      I’m on my first gig involving front-end now, with ExtJS 3.4. A few years before I joined (was able to observe the team from a periphery) they tried using Sencha’s 3.x-to-4.0 migration tool, which left the app in a state still needing attention to every LoC. The post-Idera layoffs aren’t making 6.x look too attractive.
TylerE 6y ago
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.
- imroot 6y ago
  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.
  - longcommonname 6y ago
    How much money does your company contribute to Jeff?
    - joshmanders 6y ago
      Bingoooooo. If his code is so crucial to your company, you should probably be donating to him to help pay these bills so then companies aren't the bad guy for giving thousands of dollars away for free so you can benefit off other peoples work.
    - Karupan 6y ago
      100% this! People can’t possibly complain when companies charge for their tools. If an open source project is important to an organisation, they better start donating.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Nitpicking here, the vast majority of companies that use Ansible do not use galaxy.
hacker_newz 6y ago
I don't know how the author could expect a free build service to last forever.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I don't. And as I said in the post, I'm extremely grateful for what I got. I was already migrating projects for a while, and long term may even go back to a local server for builds if GitHub pulls the rug out too. But allowing a service to manage the build system for me saved/saves a good chunk of time.
jrochkind1 6y ago
The HN thread from when Travis's purchase by Idera (private equity) was announced, Jan 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 I had pretty much already learned that "bought by private equity" means "run away as fast as you can, they are going to gut it", and I suspected as much from the travis purchase... but I didn't take action, hoping it would not be true, and not wanting the work of moving projects away. Next time I'll remind myself, no, really, you know what "private equity" means, start looking for an escape now on your own timeline before circumstances give you a deadline.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I mean, I expected this to happen, but with some amount of lead time. In this case they literally made the change the night before they announced it!
- gregors 6y ago
  and subsequent layoffs posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036 That's when I started recommending clients make plans to move to another provider
throw_m239339 6y ago
Travis CI wasn't going to remain "free" forever, especially with the new owner (which owns Sencha as well). They want to make a profit, open source free builds are not making a profit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
paledot 6y ago
> Should you want to apply for these credits please open a request with Travis CI support stating that you’d like to be considered for the OSS allotment. Please include: > Your account name and VCS provider How many credits (build minutes) you’d like to request (should your run out of credits again you can repeat the process to request more or discuss a renewable amount) Sounds like a tedious, repetitive process. If only there were a way to automate creating support tickets on a schedule...
xvilka 6y ago
I am rooting for the SourceHut CI[1][2][3]. Along with other services it has proven useful even at the current (alpha stage). Also it's the only one that supports both FreeBSD and OpenBSD (NetBSD support is unfinished [4]) [1] https://builds.sr.ht/ https://builds.sr.ht/ [2] https://man.sr.ht/tutorials/getting-started-with-builds.md https://man.sr.ht/tutorials/getting-started-with-builds.md [3] https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md [4] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/netbsd https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/...
- capableweb 6y ago
  At a glance, it doesn't seem to support neither Windows nor OSX, any ideas if it is supported with your own builder/runner or if sr.ht is working on supporting it in the future?
- boris 6y ago
  To plug another CI service, there is https://ci.cppget.org https://ci.cppget.org with focus on C/C++. It's free and unlimited for open source projects, including Windows and Mac OS.
jrochkind1 6y ago
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-source repositories on travis-ci.com and will not be affected by the migration. https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-repository-migration#q-will-travis-ci-be-getting-rid-of-free-users https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-reposito... This would seem to be grossly misleading, if not simply wrong info? There are still a bunch of travis users on travis community forums trying to figure out what's going on and why travis-ci.org seems to have stopped working (also different from what the FAQ says), who don't seem aware of the pricing change. The first line of the document is "On May 2nd, 2018 Travis CI announced that open source projects will be joining private projects on travis-ci.com!", which also includes this FAQ: > Q. Will there be lower concurrency for free accounts on travis-ci.org? > A. As part of the shift of infrastructure from .org to .com and needing to make sure all users have equal access to resources, free and open-source .org accounts will have concurrency reduced from 5 to 4 concurrent jobs. Concurrent jobs have not changed on .com, so please consider migrating your repositories as soon as possible if this is an issue. So... that's all not quite right, it turns out. 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. It's true that nobody owes us anything for free, and the free support for open source CI for the past 9 years has been a gift... It's also true that they are not being particularly transparent (an understatement; if they don't fix that FAQ soon I'm just going to call it lying) or gracious in how they are handling this transition, for an open source community that has come to rely on them.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  This is what hurt the most. I knew the migration to .com was happening. And I expected the perks (like 5 concurrent jobs) to be slowly removed over time. But to go from the status quo to 1000 build minutes and that's it in one day, with literally no lead time. That's what caused the wincing. I'm sure many of the engineers who were laid off at Travis after the buyout are shaking their heads this week.
deleted 6y ago
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linsomniac 6y ago
Thanks for this pointer, Jeff. I just spent some time adding another test in travis-ci on one of my projects, and this HN post got me to go in and set up the Github actions and badge. Side effect: The test ran in 1 minute on Github where Travis-CI took ~20.
hvaoc 6y ago
How about GitLab and your own runner ?
luord 6y ago
It might be because I'm more familiar with the syntax, but I find gitlab-ci easier to reason about than github actions. At least, it's a single file instead of a workflow and any number of actions. This is to say, if I were in Jeff's situation, I would seriously consider moving to GitLab (with mirrors in github for visibility), or at least setting up their ci to trigger from github. Though maybe I'm just speaking from lack of experience, as I've only set up actions in one project so far.
- Faaak 6y ago
  I love gitlab-ci for this exact reason: you're not vendor-locked-in in any way. Running out of credits ? Just run your own gitlab-runner.
jwilk 6y ago
The new pricing model announcement on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964601
Fizzadar 6y ago
Did not know about the pricing change (no email or any attempted communication it seems). Will be moving to GH actions immediately, bye bye Travis.
edem 6y ago
Travis is trash anyway. I've switched to CircleCI years ago and I'm happy with it. Also completely free. PS: I'm in no way affiliated with CircleCI, I'm just a happy customer.
hannob 6y ago
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 your travis file shouldn't do much more than installing dependencies and running the stuff that's under your control. Put all the logic into the stuff you can control - and next time you find out that your favorite CI provider is no longer nice to you you simply use another one, the migration should not take more than a few minutes.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  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.
IceWreck 6y ago
The travis-ci.org website still lists this lol, "Testing your open source projects will always be free! Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that connects so many people."
- abnercoimbre 6y ago
  My heart skipped a beat. Why is it extremely difficult to be honest about wanting to make a profit one day?,
abathur 6y ago
Frustrated by this as well. Have spent several days over the past few months working on a reimplementation of Nix support to make it possible to wind down "community" support without forcing projects to find a new CI. Feels like a lot of wasted effort. :/
Havoc 6y ago
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
- user5994461 6y ago
  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.
  - Havoc 6y ago
    >and when it doesn't there are 3 other competitors ready to take over. Apparently the transition is painful enough to warrant a sizable hn discussion though.
dawnerd 6y ago
Get a cheap server and just self host drone. It’s been rock solid for me. Although I am using GitHub actions more, drone powers all of more heavy duty docker builds.
- toasted_flakes 6y ago
  Drone has recently been bought by Harness. Will it still be around in a year or two?
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    Good question. Running the old version will still work for the foreseeable future. Since it's on github Im sure someone would just fork it anyways. Also just noticed I'm running a really old version.
Seb-C 6y ago
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.
- toasted_flakes 6y ago
  Have you read the article? The author has literally hundreds of repositories on github.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  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.
physicsguy 6y ago
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.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  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.
Znafon 6y ago
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?
- jpalomaki 6y ago
  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).
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    There’s a lot of things Travis ci could do. This is a great idea to help offset their costs, they could also have made their platform better to bring in more paying companies. They haven’t at all kept up with competitors as tooling and build processes have evolved in the past 9 years (namely easy to use docker-native test environments, and parallelization options for big codebases). I agree with the parent comment, it’s bizarre to blame this on the new acquiring company and to be mad about this development. Travis ci has been asleep at the wheel for many years, and projects have been benefiting from it with huge amounts of free compute for years, but now the free money has run out.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  TravisCI bought goodwill and marketing of their paid offering by offering free builds for open source products. Effectively removing or severely restricting that benefit will essentially lose the goodwill and word of mouth marketing. It's true that to criticise someone giving you something for free is being a "choosing beggar", but that's not really what's happening here. TravisCI has bought something with their free offering, so it's fair that they lose that when they revoke that offering.
zwilliamson 6y ago
I moved my open source repos to GitHub Actions from TravisCI after experiencing 6+ hour build queues. So far, GitHub Actions has been great and I love the Super Linter!
bluedino 6y ago
It sucks when people start charging for stuff.

214 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

> I just spent the past 6 hours migrating some of my open source projects from Travis CI to GitHub Actions Man. Sounds like my personal hell. I’ll never understand how people motivate themselves to run projects. When I think about it I just envision doing a bunch of crap like that, dealing with issues people file, etc etc. No thank you.

jfim 6y ago

Pretty much any time there's an acquisition of a company, followed by a firing of a significant fraction of the engineering staff, one should run away from it. Sucks though for Travis CI users, I used it in the past and it worked well.

deleted 6y ago
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tasogare 6y ago

> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.

lykr0n 6y ago
This. If I had a cloud hosted CI tool, I would gladly allow open source projects to use it. But they would be lowest priority and there would be limitations on how often builds could happen and/or volume of contributions. Large corporate backed opensource projects should absolutely be paying for tools like Travis CI. Just because it's open source doesn't mean there isn't money floating around. It's not super hard to rent a VPS or Physical Server somewhere and spend a few hours setting up <insert ci tool of your choice).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  It's not the setting it up that's preventing someone like me from self-hosting these kinds of tools. It's the maintenance, security, accessibility, etc. More time on all that (or risking hacks and having more downtime) equals less time actually working on the projects being tested.
azdle 6y ago
Well, their lowest paid tier is $69/month. I dunno about you, but that's way more than I can justify spending to be able to support doing work for free. If they had a $50/year or so plan that just restored the previous open source plan, I'd be more willing to consider something like that, but >$800 a year puts it firmly out of my price bracket for what it offers me.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  This. I am willing to pay but there's no way I can spend my yearly "save for a new laptop every couple years" budget on one SaaS for projects that generally contribute $0.00 to my bottom line.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    This is why I use GitLab with self-hosted runners for all sorts of esoteric platforms, then use their linux runners for the basics. I don't like to freeload, so I do have a Bronze subscription which includes a certain number of monthly CI minutes for private projects, as mentioned here: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/09/01/ci-minutes-update-free-users/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/09/01/ci-minutes-upda.... But I rarely make use of it. Also note that there are special arrangements for Open Source projects. I can totally understand limiting the number of minutes available. It must cost an absolute fortune, and having it unbounded makes it easy to abuse. Having to pay makes developers have to consider if they really need to go overboard on huge build matrices and limit themselves to something reasonable. Likewise for constraining the amount of network traffic. If you don't want to blow your budget, then self-hosting is an obvious and easy choice.
geerlingguy 6y ago
The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on some form of marketing to build up some kind of financial support (tip jars, Patreon, etc), but the pricing for Travis is astronomical for non-enterprise usage. But as I said in the post, I'm grateful for what I got for the 8 years I had it. And I'm happy that GitHub/MS is now running with that gauntlet.
- mtlynch 6y ago
  Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor. Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading! [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c18aedc46415785853848ddf6de9d372ed490/meta/main.yml#L36L82 https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c1...
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    Ha, thanks so much! I'm trying (and having at least moderate success) to make it so I can devote half my weekly 'work' hours to pure OSS work, and the sponsorships are getting me close!
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Interesting. You put in work, Travis CI puts in work, but the surplus accrues to a third-party. Hmm. Unfortunate. It's possible that most OSS won't have CI servers in the future. I don't imagine that's the end of the world but it does suck.
- tasogare 6y ago

f311a 6y ago

I think everyone should move from Travis CI, especially private repos. Idera bought the project that has no future, and it wants to get the money back. It won't get any better. Idera has fired a lot of Travis CI engineers, and your private repositories are now at risk. They can save some extra money on security.

ishcheklein 6y ago

We had been paying ~$500/month for the open-source project (https://dvc.org https://dvc.org) even before this new pricing model, and migrated to GitHub Actions recently- works like a charm. The only issue that we have now is Windows builds- machines on GH have a bit less resources, but it's good for us to optimize it anyway.

sounds 6y ago

Hey Jeff, This is hitting me hard, too. I hope this is the right moment for me to pipe up and say this: I always just do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run. I am grateful for the free minutes they offer open source projects - but any of the deeper integrations, the advanced automation? No, thanks. It's not like the other developers who use what I write have any more motivation than I do. No one wants to learn the custom setup steps, not even for the "biggest" of the bunch. (Is that still Github? Who knows? I don't.) Oh, and if or when I migrate away from a CI system, like right now... Good thing I just kept it simple, you know? Even for builds that target Windows, I just run a shell script. I get it that Node and Rust builds really benefit from the advanced features. Anyone care to comment - is it as portable as a shell script?

steveklabnik 6y ago
I don’t think either of them really “benefit from the advanced features” any more than any other language. Also, both have builds that are generally more cross platform than a shell script, given that they’re native on all platforms, and shell is not.
monkeybutton 6y ago
>do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run This. 100%. Where I'm working is migrating from Bamboo to Jenkins. For my team the new process is just calling "./build-test $params" while others are stuck re-implementing various stages, tasks and blah blah blah. Also an added bonus to this is having the full history of changes to the CI/CD process tracked in git.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I call mine make.sh. Now get off my lawn!
  - monkeybutton 6y ago
    Hey! I started with C projects and make scripts and I long for the simplicity of those days! Obtuse web front ends, bunches of build server pools segregated by random capabilities, job queues clogged by competing developer teams and on and on is no fun.

azdle 6y ago

I've been using Travis on a bunch of my opensource projects and was wondering why builds were getting queued for ~a day before they'd run, I guess I got my answer. :/ I don't really want to lock myself into GH actions (ideally, I wouldn't be on GH at all), does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying some money, but the almost $1K/year for Travis' lowest tier is about an order of magnitude more than I can justify. I've also got plenty of compute laying around if anyone has suggestions for something self-hosted.

rochak 6y ago
Have you looked into CircleCI?
- azdle 6y ago
  I've used it in the past, but when they finally killed off the 1.0 builders (?) my company went to an "internally" hosted Jenkins[1] server and I haven't played with any of the 2.0 stuff. Have you? How do you find working with it? [1] I did also ask about selfhosted stuff, but I'm not willing to host Jenkins for myself. I've heard nothing but complaints about managing a Jenkins install. It's been fine as a user (if a bit confusing), but I really don't want to admin it.
  - vosper 6y ago
    Not the person you're asking, but we use CircleCI, and it's fine. The YAML config language is okay, it gets the job done and hasn't been horrible to maintain or modify. Though we only have a few steps in each. My current gripe is that there doesn't seem to be any way to declare that one pipeline depends on another, though I may just be missing something in the docs. What I'm trying to do is have my front-end feature branch builds run against the build of matching back-end branch, but there doesn't seem a way to declare "this build should depends on the output artifact of that build". I don't really want to have to wire it up myself using their API.
    - driverdan 6y ago

PebblesHD 6y ago

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.

schoen 6y ago
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?
- PebblesHD 6y ago
  If you’re comfortable with AWS or any other VPS provider, there are Ansible and Docker flavours of most common tools. I’m a fan of Jenkins but the competition also offers some well defined pathways to get this going easily, and all of them offer a somewhat similar way to define builds automatically in code. My go-to is the github org scanner plugin that can watch for new repos with a Jenkinsfile, and will happily manage creating the automatic commit hooks if a new one is found giving you a very similar level of ‘magic’ integration to what the SaaS tools offer.
- MaKey 6y ago
  There is Concourse CI [0], which appears to be simple to set up. [0] https://concourse-ci.org/ https://concourse-ci.org/

jrochkind1 6y ago

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.com/user/migrate/open-source-repository-migration#frequently-asked-questions https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-reposito...) I actually had not seen that announcement at all, this is the first I'm seeing it. So I'm in the same position as OP, I maybe should not have spent time migrating my projects to travis-ci.com. Although I guess this buys me a bit of time to move to github actions instead. Travis is the reason that many people DO CI at all, in my experience. They made it so easy -- and free for open source -- that there was no reason NOT to do it. Then once you see the value of it, you are hooked, you can't do without it. But I think the number of projects doing CI (open source and not) skyrocketed because of travis. Prior to travis's entry on the scene, CI was not nearly as universal as it is now. So to say that offering free CI to open source is "unsustainable".... I dunno, they managed to do it for 9 years, were they losing money the whole time? I think the free service for open source literally created the market. Or expanded it exponentially. It was the first exposure a lot of people had to CI, and they took that first step because it was so easy and free. And now we're hooked. If there weren't other free alternatives like Github Actions, I don't know what open source would do... we all know we can't develop this stuff without CI, but so many open source projects simply don't have a budget for it.

geerlingguy 6y ago
All three companies I worked for that ended up paying for a beefy Travis CI enterprise plan did so after getting hooked through the open source offering and wanting more concurrent runners and faster builds. Without that funnel, and knowing it's all integrated deeply in both GitLab and GitHub, I wonder where Travis CI could ever expect growth again... but that's probably not the end goal anymore, just milking the current paying clients and maintaining the status quo.
- jrochkind1 6y ago

rosineygp 6y ago

I had to change CI many times. From jenkins to gitlab... From travis to github actions... So I build this small project that helps me to change faster without touch in real CI logic. https://github.com/rosineygp/mkdkr https://github.com/rosineygp/mkdkr I think your problem is bigger than mine, but this kind of approach can help you in the future.

weka 6y ago

Not surprised. Travis CI is owned by Idera, Inc. who also own Sencha who make Ext.js -- a pay-to-use JavaScript framework. First thing they did when Idera, Inc. bought Travis CI? They gutted the Travis CI team.

segmondy 6y ago
That's Idera, if they buy anything you use, run!. Private Equity is all about milking the cow till the cow dies.
vosper 6y ago
> who also own Sencha who make Ext.js -- a pay-to-use JavaScript framework. I pity anyone who's paying for Ext.js (self-described as "The Best JavaScript Framework In The World"). That is some ancient shit right there. They must have some poor sods who're really, truly, stuck if they're managing to get people to pay for it. I guess at least you get support in your quagmire. But good luck finding quality developers who want to work on an Ext.js project...
- Joeri 6y ago
  I worked with extjs 2 and 3 for years and honestly productivity was as high or higher than angular or react. It was a game changer and allowed us to build things an order of magnitude faster than before. I really liked it. What it lacked was a good responsiveness story, and by the time they added that I was already gone, first to backbone and later to angular and react. The amount of vendor lock-in of Extjs is massive though. It had its own JSX-like pseudolanguage for describing UI that was impossible to port to anything else. Moving away meant a total rewrite.
  - mike22 6y ago
    I’m on my first gig involving front-end now, with ExtJS 3.4. A few years before I joined (was able to observe the team from a periphery) they tried using Sencha’s 3.x-to-4.0 migration tool, which left the app in a state still needing attention to every LoC. The post-Idera layoffs aren’t making 6.x look too attractive.

TylerE 6y ago

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.

imroot 6y ago
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.
- longcommonname 6y ago
  How much money does your company contribute to Jeff?
  - joshmanders 6y ago
    Bingoooooo. If his code is so crucial to your company, you should probably be donating to him to help pay these bills so then companies aren't the bad guy for giving thousands of dollars away for free so you can benefit off other peoples work.
  - Karupan 6y ago
    100% this! People can’t possibly complain when companies charge for their tools. If an open source project is important to an organisation, they better start donating.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Nitpicking here, the vast majority of companies that use Ansible do not use galaxy.

hacker_newz 6y ago

I don't know how the author could expect a free build service to last forever.

geerlingguy 6y ago
I don't. And as I said in the post, I'm extremely grateful for what I got. I was already migrating projects for a while, and long term may even go back to a local server for builds if GitHub pulls the rug out too. But allowing a service to manage the build system for me saved/saves a good chunk of time.

jrochkind1 6y ago

The HN thread from when Travis's purchase by Idera (private equity) was announced, Jan 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 I had pretty much already learned that "bought by private equity" means "run away as fast as you can, they are going to gut it", and I suspected as much from the travis purchase... but I didn't take action, hoping it would not be true, and not wanting the work of moving projects away. Next time I'll remind myself, no, really, you know what "private equity" means, start looking for an escape now on your own timeline before circumstances give you a deadline.

geerlingguy 6y ago
I mean, I expected this to happen, but with some amount of lead time. In this case they literally made the change the night before they announced it!
gregors 6y ago
and subsequent layoffs posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036 That's when I started recommending clients make plans to move to another provider

throw_m239339 6y ago

Travis CI wasn't going to remain "free" forever, especially with the new owner (which owns Sencha as well). They want to make a profit, open source free builds are not making a profit.

deleted 6y ago
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paledot 6y ago

> Should you want to apply for these credits please open a request with Travis CI support stating that you’d like to be considered for the OSS allotment. Please include: > Your account name and VCS provider How many credits (build minutes) you’d like to request (should your run out of credits again you can repeat the process to request more or discuss a renewable amount) Sounds like a tedious, repetitive process. If only there were a way to automate creating support tickets on a schedule...

xvilka 6y ago

I am rooting for the SourceHut CI[1][2][3]. Along with other services it has proven useful even at the current (alpha stage). Also it's the only one that supports both FreeBSD and OpenBSD (NetBSD support is unfinished [4]) [1] https://builds.sr.ht/ https://builds.sr.ht/ [2] https://man.sr.ht/tutorials/getting-started-with-builds.md https://man.sr.ht/tutorials/getting-started-with-builds.md [3] https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md [4] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/netbsd https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/...

capableweb 6y ago
At a glance, it doesn't seem to support neither Windows nor OSX, any ideas if it is supported with your own builder/runner or if sr.ht is working on supporting it in the future?
boris 6y ago
To plug another CI service, there is https://ci.cppget.org https://ci.cppget.org with focus on C/C++. It's free and unlimited for open source projects, including Windows and Mac OS.

jrochkind1 6y ago

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-source repositories on travis-ci.com and will not be affected by the migration. https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-repository-migration#q-will-travis-ci-be-getting-rid-of-free-users https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-reposito... This would seem to be grossly misleading, if not simply wrong info? There are still a bunch of travis users on travis community forums trying to figure out what's going on and why travis-ci.org seems to have stopped working (also different from what the FAQ says), who don't seem aware of the pricing change. The first line of the document is "On May 2nd, 2018 Travis CI announced that open source projects will be joining private projects on travis-ci.com!", which also includes this FAQ: > Q. Will there be lower concurrency for free accounts on travis-ci.org? > A. As part of the shift of infrastructure from .org to .com and needing to make sure all users have equal access to resources, free and open-source .org accounts will have concurrency reduced from 5 to 4 concurrent jobs. Concurrent jobs have not changed on .com, so please consider migrating your repositories as soon as possible if this is an issue. So... that's all not quite right, it turns out. 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. It's true that nobody owes us anything for free, and the free support for open source CI for the past 9 years has been a gift... It's also true that they are not being particularly transparent (an understatement; if they don't fix that FAQ soon I'm just going to call it lying) or gracious in how they are handling this transition, for an open source community that has come to rely on them.

geerlingguy 6y ago
This is what hurt the most. I knew the migration to .com was happening. And I expected the perks (like 5 concurrent jobs) to be slowly removed over time. But to go from the status quo to 1000 build minutes and that's it in one day, with literally no lead time. That's what caused the wincing. I'm sure many of the engineers who were laid off at Travis after the buyout are shaking their heads this week.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

linsomniac 6y ago

Thanks for this pointer, Jeff. I just spent some time adding another test in travis-ci on one of my projects, and this HN post got me to go in and set up the Github actions and badge. Side effect: The test ran in 1 minute on Github where Travis-CI took ~20.

hvaoc 6y ago

How about GitLab and your own runner ?

luord 6y ago

It might be because I'm more familiar with the syntax, but I find gitlab-ci easier to reason about than github actions. At least, it's a single file instead of a workflow and any number of actions. This is to say, if I were in Jeff's situation, I would seriously consider moving to GitLab (with mirrors in github for visibility), or at least setting up their ci to trigger from github. Though maybe I'm just speaking from lack of experience, as I've only set up actions in one project so far.

Faaak 6y ago
I love gitlab-ci for this exact reason: you're not vendor-locked-in in any way. Running out of credits ? Just run your own gitlab-runner.

jwilk 6y ago

The new pricing model announcement on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964601

Fizzadar 6y ago

Did not know about the pricing change (no email or any attempted communication it seems). Will be moving to GH actions immediately, bye bye Travis.

edem 6y ago

Travis is trash anyway. I've switched to CircleCI years ago and I'm happy with it. Also completely free. PS: I'm in no way affiliated with CircleCI, I'm just a happy customer.

hannob 6y ago

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 your travis file shouldn't do much more than installing dependencies and running the stuff that's under your control. Put all the logic into the stuff you can control - and next time you find out that your favorite CI provider is no longer nice to you you simply use another one, the migration should not take more than a few minutes.

geerlingguy 6y ago
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.

IceWreck 6y ago

The travis-ci.org website still lists this lol, "Testing your open source projects will always be free! Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that connects so many people."

abnercoimbre 6y ago
My heart skipped a beat. Why is it extremely difficult to be honest about wanting to make a profit one day?,

abathur 6y ago

Frustrated by this as well. Have spent several days over the past few months working on a reimplementation of Nix support to make it possible to wind down "community" support without forcing projects to find a new CI. Feels like a lot of wasted effort. :/

Havoc 6y ago

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

user5994461 6y ago
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.
- Havoc 6y ago
  >and when it doesn't there are 3 other competitors ready to take over. Apparently the transition is painful enough to warrant a sizable hn discussion though.

dawnerd 6y ago

Get a cheap server and just self host drone. It’s been rock solid for me. Although I am using GitHub actions more, drone powers all of more heavy duty docker builds.

toasted_flakes 6y ago
Drone has recently been bought by Harness. Will it still be around in a year or two?
- dawnerd 6y ago
  Good question. Running the old version will still work for the foreseeable future. Since it's on github Im sure someone would just fork it anyways. Also just noticed I'm running a really old version.

Seb-C 6y ago

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.

toasted_flakes 6y ago
Have you read the article? The author has literally hundreds of repositories on github.
geerlingguy 6y ago
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.

physicsguy 6y ago

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.

geerlingguy 6y ago
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.

Znafon 6y ago

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?

jpalomaki 6y ago
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).
- cactus2093 6y ago
  There’s a lot of things Travis ci could do. This is a great idea to help offset their costs, they could also have made their platform better to bring in more paying companies. They haven’t at all kept up with competitors as tooling and build processes have evolved in the past 9 years (namely easy to use docker-native test environments, and parallelization options for big codebases). I agree with the parent comment, it’s bizarre to blame this on the new acquiring company and to be mad about this development. Travis ci has been asleep at the wheel for many years, and projects have been benefiting from it with huge amounts of free compute for years, but now the free money has run out.
danpalmer 6y ago
TravisCI bought goodwill and marketing of their paid offering by offering free builds for open source products. Effectively removing or severely restricting that benefit will essentially lose the goodwill and word of mouth marketing. It's true that to criticise someone giving you something for free is being a "choosing beggar", but that's not really what's happening here. TravisCI has bought something with their free offering, so it's fair that they lose that when they revoke that offering.

zwilliamson 6y ago

I moved my open source repos to GitHub Actions from TravisCI after experiencing 6+ hour build queues. So far, GitHub Actions has been great and I love the Super Linter!

bluedino 6y ago

It sucks when people start charging for stuff.