Travis CI complains of 'significant abuse' of its free deal, creates new pricing that has developers riled

Travis CI, whose product is a continuous integration tool which can automatically test and deploy applications when new code is merged, has introduced new pricing plans in an effort to strike a better balance between free and paid-for subscriptions. A banner on travis-ci.org, which describes itself as “the home of open source …

[Anonymous Coward]

GitLab

> and GitLab which includes 400 CI/CD minutes free for any team. GitLab also offers free licences for “qualifying open source projects.”

Even better, use GitLab but install the GitLab Runner on your own computer (or your own VPS). It doesn't need to be reachable from the internet (it's pull-based) so you can install anywhere.

You then configure your projects to use your own Runner and everyone wins.

[Anonymous Coward]

make

Is still free.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: make

....but sooo 1980s.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: make

Things worked in the 1980s. They were agile, but without the capital A.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: make

Whoosh

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: make

What is being discussed is not what technology you use, but where you run it.

After all, you can run Travis CI on your own metal (or make-based continuous integration on their servers, for that matter).

[ConfusedAntelope]

Dammit, Travis

Travis was the only way for me to create a macOS build of my program, since I can't afford to buy a Mac for that sole purpose.

This is a disaster.

[Robert Grant]

Re: Dammit, Travis

Why's it a disaster? What's the new cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dammit, Travis

Why are you building for Mac OS if you can't afford to develop on the platform? I don't have much hope for your success, of the quality of your offering to be honest.

[Xiox]

Re: Dammit, Travis

You can do Mac builds for free on Github Actions or Azure Pipelines for open source projects.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dammit, Travis

Get a macOS virtual machine: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.makeuseof.com/tag/macos-windows-10-virtual-machine/amp/

[as2003]

Maybe say "thanks" for years of a free service instead of "assholes!" for taking it away?

This kind of entitlement reminds me of the people who angrily complain about bugs in FOSS assembled by volunteers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point.

Also, zero marks for planning and foresight. If you do not control it, it can be taken away from you at any time. Nothing wrong with that, you just need to have at least a sketch of a plan B for when that happens (and it does happen all the time).

[dominickpastore]

The problem isn't that Travis CI doesn't want to give away free stuff. Plenty of companies don't give their product away for free, and nobody complains. People are mad becaue Travis CI promised something and now they are going back on their word.

Should everyone have been prepared for the possibility? Of course, but that doesn't mean the transition will be painless. It's perfectly reasonable to be mad about broken promises.

[gggeek]

Re: "zero marks for planning and foresight" - talk is cheap; implementing a Disaster Recovery plan is not.

I maintain two dozen or more open source projects.

All of them were started or inherited as part of my employee duties, but currently I am self-employed. While my previous employers were happy enough with the dissemination of their IP in open source - mostly to gain street cred useful to recruit the brighter young devs, I guess - they were much less inclined to pay for any CI/CD tooling and hosting.

Over time all the projects have been all migrated from Sourceforge, self-hosted svn, etc... to Github. Hard to resist a service that is free, well-known and loved by the oss community and has best-in-class features and ease of use.

What would happen if tomorrow Github goes titsup, or deletes my account for whatever reason? I surely do have backups of every project's source code, but it still would take time to upload them to a new hosting. Plus I would loose a lot of non-code project data such as open issues, web pages, lists of contributors.

The situation with Travis is not dissimilar: when it started it has a unique offer. Now it is not unique any more, and probably not free for long.

Will I be able to move to Giithub Actions? Surely yes. Am I looking forward to that with trepidation? Not really :-)