by jameshilliard on 12/7/20, 11:05 PM with 187 comments
https://twitter.com/james_hilliard/status/133608177669184307...
Hello James,
Thanks for writing in.
At the moment, credit allocation for OSS projects is on hold as per directives from management. Sincere apologies please.
We will provide updates once we get additional approval from management.
Thanks for your patience
-- MK
Your Friends @Travis CI
Test and Deploy with Confidence.
by jrochkind1 on 12/8/20, 12:01 AM
Their home page at travis-ci.com still says:
> Testing your open source projects is always 100% free!
> Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that gives us so much as well.
That is simply not what's going on. As far as anyone can tell, they are offering some OSS which meet specific criteria (including no company funds any part of it, including paying people to work on it(?!)) free minutes in fixed monthly allotments, which you have to keep asking for every month. And there are only so many total minutes they are willing to give out, which apparently have now been frozen.
How can they have written a letter only two weeks ago saying "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com"? How can their home page still say "Testing your open source projects is always 100% free!"??
At this point, it is hard to explain it as anything other than intentional manipulative dishonesty.
I don't understand why they don't just say "Yes, we can no longer provide free open source accounts." They aren't actually fooling anyone, I mean people notice that they don't have free accounts anymore, right? It is a weird attempt at some kind of reality distortion.
I guess you could try replying: "Credit allocation"? I don't understand, Paul Gordon wrote on Nov 24 "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Is this not true?
I'm kinda curious what they'd say, but I guess it's just torturing poor support staff whose jobs probably aren't going to last either.
by geerlingguy on 12/7/20, 11:58 PM
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 else (even though there are many adequate alternatives).
I wish there was another way, like providing a meager amount of build minutes, or just reducing the OSS builds to run on a few dozen servers, even if that means days-long build queues. That's better than just ending service abruptly like they did.
I wrote [1] about my own plans, but I know many devs (especially for tiny side projects) just don't have the time to update them to something else, and we're likely to see a number of smaller projects kind of fall into disrepair from this.
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/travis-cis-new-pricin...
by IfOnlyYouKnew on 12/8/20, 5:56 AM
So, if anyone can come up with the name for whoever bought them, a sale that was probably done with little alternatives already, then hate those peoples with all you got, got ahead[1].
But don't take it out on the people that helped you all those years. Not even if they screwed up the endgame by, maybe, being too optimistic for a week too long.
[1]: But not too many death threats, maybe. Even just for purely selfish reasons, one wouldn't want commitments to OSS become a poison pill that makes any company providing such services toxic to investors.
by sciurus on 12/8/20, 1:13 AM
? 2018: Travis CI announces they are starting the process of merging travis-ci.org, which provided free builds for OSS projects, into travis-ci.com, which until then was only for paying customers. They promise OSS builds will continue to be free.
? 2020: Travis CI announces they are shutting down travis-ci.org at the end of the year and all projects have to move to travis-ci.com. They promise OSS builds will continue to be free.
Early November 2020: travis-ci.com switches from providing unlimited builds for OSS to only providing 10k one-time credits by default. Projects that meet certain guidelines (e.g. no one paid to work on them) can apply for recurring credits.
Later in November 2020: CI for many OSS projects that had migrated to travis-ci.com starts to fail, as they've exhausted their 10K credits.
Dec 2020: If what is reported here is accurate, Travis CI stop providing any recurring OSS credits. CI breaks for the remaining OSS projects on travis-ci.com.
Jan 2021: travis-ci.org shuts down. CI will be broken for all projects using it. They'll have the option of migrating to travis-ci.com, but will soon break again as they exhaust their 10k credits.
I suspect that many, many projects haven't migrated from .org to .com and are going to be surprised when their CI breaks on January 1st. It looks like their only option is to start paying Travis CI or move to an alternate provider (like CircleCI or Github Actions, both of which have free tiers for OSS).
If Travis CI's new owners are no longer willing to provide free CI services to OSS projects, that's understandable. I just wish they'd communicate that clearly in ways that their users won't miss.
(BTW, if anyone from Travis CI is reading this, I reached out to your support team last week for help on a problem that is blocking us from potentially paying you. I haven't gotten an answer yet on ticket 23831. Any help is appreciated.)
by dessant on 12/8/20, 12:30 AM
https://travis-ci.community/t/current-known-issues-please-re...
by nn3 on 12/8/20, 5:10 AM
I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.
by judge2020 on 12/7/20, 11:40 PM
by zmmmmm on 12/8/20, 1:32 AM
The problem is, if you assume good will from Travis, then this is a VERY drastic action to take since it strongly contradicts their past statements. From that you would infer, Travis is in serious trouble and I would worry a lot about building in dependencies on it as a paying customer.
On the other hand, if you assume bad will from Travis .... well, then that also would mean you should not use them as a paying customer.
So it's just bad.
by tbodt on 12/8/20, 3:45 AM
It should be possible to make a GitHub action that runs an existing .travis.yml.
by bamboleo on 12/7/20, 11:49 PM
Good thing I was an earlier GitHub Actions adopter because now I don’t have to do as much work.
by rezonant on 12/8/20, 12:17 AM
With Github Actions on the scene now, I don't see much reason to use Travis over one of the alternatives.
by akx on 12/8/20, 12:32 PM
Currently it deals with rudimentary Python and Node.js workflows, but contributions are naturally welcome.
by empyrical on 12/8/20, 1:53 AM
[1] https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-11-12-multi-cpu-architecture...
by tonymet on 12/8/20, 1:37 AM
by greggman3 on 12/8/20, 8:09 AM
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!
by dis-sys on 12/8/20, 1:21 AM
So "my friends" at travis ci just disabled my free access to travis ci for my open source projects and I am suppose to have confidence. nice!
by lewispringle on 12/8/20, 4:22 AM
https://github.com/SophistSolutions/Stroika/actions?query=br...
by chillfox on 12/8/20, 1:36 AM
On top of that it is easy to setup a private CI runner on a $5 month VM.
by daenz on 12/8/20, 12:09 AM
It's a shame. Something like this should exist, but I can't blame them for not wanting to do it for free.
by tome on 12/8/20, 8:48 AM
It would be an "annoying" or "fiddly" level of work rather than a time sink costing hours and hours.
by lopatin on 12/8/20, 4:34 AM
by echopom on 12/8/20, 1:00 PM
Travis CI made their exit few months ago with a Venture Firm , every venture firm use the same model of "Hibernation" to get cashflow from the platform without new investment.
Only two option to do so :
- increasing price
- reducing cost
Removing the "0$" price for Open Source Project is a disguised way to increase the price...
It's likely the majority of the staff was laid off and the project is now hibernating living from acquired customers not adding new feature or change.
Just being used as a source of Corporate Cash Flow.
by alien_ on 12/8/20, 6:42 AM
My project only needs about 30m of build time monthly and the migration to something else may cost me a few hours of work. At my hourly rate that may be significant enough, so for a while I would rather pay a small monthly fee to cover my limited needs.
by ndesaulniers on 12/8/20, 3:17 AM
I emailed them last week; I suspect I'll receive a similar email, soon!
by gt565k on 12/8/20, 7:17 PM
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.
by p1necone on 12/8/20, 5:18 AM
There's also Github Actions and Bitbucket Pipelines which I think are very similar in style, and also have free tiers.
There's also the "Raspberry PI in a closet" option, which I might explore over the Christmas holidays.
Dockerhub being free is something else I can't see lasting forever, their bandwidth costs must be immense? Although maybe they make enough from enterprise contracts to make up for it?
by nojvek on 12/8/20, 4:44 PM
If they were walking away from people who wanted to give them money, I can imagine they don’t give a shit about OSS projects where they lose money.
TravisCI taught me a hard lesson. Relying on 3rd party for CI is a losing bet if you care about reliability and guaranteed capacity.
by kats on 12/8/20, 4:48 AM
by kall on 12/8/20, 10:42 AM
by dave_sid on 12/8/20, 1:43 AM
by josteink on 12/8/20, 8:22 AM
Now I've migrated my remaining 10+ Travis-CI builds to a different CI-provider (GitHub Actions).
It feels like a solid upgrade.
by oxfordmale on 12/8/20, 8:55 AM
by mhd on 12/8/20, 11:15 AM
by fogfish on 12/8/20, 5:22 AM
by wraptile on 12/8/20, 8:11 AM
by totorovirus on 12/8/20, 8:54 AM
by chubot on 12/8/20, 1:30 AM
http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/11/fixes-and-updates.html#...
A contributor added .travis.yml about 3 years ago, before I had ever used it. But I've been around the block enough to know that getting stuff for free is temporary. (And to be fair, I did like Travis CI free service a lot better than I thought I would.)
So when I needed to enhance the continuous build back in January, I did it with a PORTABLE SHELL SCRIPT, NOT with yaml. Both Travis CI and sr.ht provide Linux VMs, which are easily operated with a shell script.
The script called "Toil" does the following:
1. Configures which steps are run in which build tasks (both Travis CI and sr.ht can run multiple tasks in parallel for each commit)
2. Logs each step, times it, summarizes failure/success
3. Archives/compresses the logs
3. Publishes the result to my own domain, which is A LOT FASTER than the Travis CI dashboard. (sr.ht is very fast too; it has a great web design.)
This ended up working great, so I have multiple CI services running the same jobs, and publishing to the same place: http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/
(I plan to create srht.oilshell.org for security reasons; it isn't ideal that both services have a key to publish to the same domain.)
----
I think this is the future of the Oil project: shell scripts to enable portability across clouds. If you want to be fancy, it's a distributed or decentralized shell.
This is natural because shell already coordinates processes on a single machine.
- A distributed shell coordinates processes across multiple machines (under the same domain of trust)
- A decentralized one does so across domains of trust (across clouds)
-----
Really great work in this direction is gg:
https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/papers-i-love-gg/ comments: https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg
which is a tool that runs distributed programs across multiple FaaS providers like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc.
https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg
My "toil" script is a lot more basic, but an analogous idea. I would like to create a slightly tighter but improved abstraction that runs on multiple cloud services. Notes on gg here:
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Distributed-Shell
If anyone wants to help, get in touch! If you are pissed off about Travis then you might want this :) I think these kinds of multi-cloud setups are inevitable given the incentives and resources of each party, and they already exist (probably in a pretty ugly/fragile form).
by koreanguy on 12/8/20, 4:15 AM
Bamboo. ... TeamCity. ... Appveyor. ... Codeship.
lots more use google
by robinduckett on 12/8/20, 7:30 AM
Although inconvenient, it is possible to run these tests on my own computer before publishing.
by throw_m239339 on 12/8/20, 4:41 AM
People are now moving to github actions, which are fine, but for how long github actions are going to be free for OSS projects as well? One cannot expect all these freebees to last forever, that's why open source needs financing like any other software development.