Hi,
I used to rely heavily on Travis due to its educational program and general open source friendliness.
With the changes introduced on November 2nd, I see however that my account, which is a teacher account on GitHub (and hence should be an academic account on Travis), displays the following error message:
Builds have been temporarily disabled for public repositories due to a negative credit balance. Please go to the Plan page to replenish your credit balance or alter your Consume paid credits for OSS setting.
Do I understand correctly that OSS projects are now built in a sort of trial mode, and, once consumed, credits are gone until a plan is bought?
Is the educational program still active, or has it been canceled/suspended with the new pricing model?
I had been using Travis for research, OSS development, and teaching as well (as a reference CI platform for my students), so in case the educational program is no longer available I will need to find an alternative.
That’s unfortunate, but thanks for the answer, at least I know it’s not an exception targeting my own account. I wrote to support and got no answer as well. I’m considering switching to GHA for both my projects and teaching.
So currently all educational accounts have been suspended without prior notice, open source projects are de facto “dead projects building”, as once the 10K credits run out they get suspended (even though this FAQ suggests otherwise), and finally I can now also say that the suppor team likely does not read emails but replies with a standard template.
In the answer, they did not mention the educational accounts. So we do not know whether they exist anymore, despite my question. However, they revealed the criteria for marking a project as open source with a travis build enabled:
You are a project lead or regular committer (latest commit in the last month)
Project must be at least 3 months old and is in active development (with regular commits and activity)
Project meets the OSD specification
Project must not be sponsored by a commercial company or organization (monetary or with employees paid to work on the project)
Project can not provide commercial services or distribute paid versions of the software
Points 3 to 5 are more than reasonable, but points 1 and 2 are complete no-gos for educational use. Student projects have a short lifespan, and they can’t get developed for three months before they get a working CI pipeline: with such limitations, and an educational program currently non-working and of which the future is unknown, the only way for academics is to migrate away.
I also have some questions for normal OSS projects, though: what happens if a project reaches maturity and gets only sporadic commits? Does it die if nobody commits for one month, as per item 1?
For instance, at the time of writing Google Gson’s last commit is from may 13th: I guess that such project no longer qualifies for an OSS account on Travis.
I guess they think that for a student’s project, the initial 10k credits would be enough…
Alternatively, the institution can make a Travis organization and provide their students with credits from that.
Moving a whole institution like my university (80K students) or even just my department to make an agreement with Travis is very difficult and requires a lot of time. It required months and a pandemic to be able to have academic agreements with Overleaf, which is a tool used by a large part of the department.
Travis is being used by few of us (and mostly (phd) students and post-doc, so the political pressure is small): the time for my institution to find an agreement is most definitely incompatible with the current (very chaotic) transition to a paid model.
Also, such a change without prior notice does not really makes the company look reliable, which makes it even harder to convince those at the high floors.
Finally, there’s a page that states that there are free academic plans: why would my institution pay for something that the other company claims is giving away for free?
Note that again the problem is communication: if Travis management believes that 10K credits are okay for a student project (they are not for the projects our students develop, but anyway), it’s fine, it’s their policy. But please do not advertise «As a student, you can run one concurrent job and add as many collaborators as you want.» because that’s simply not true.
If I start a new project, I will want to test it before it’s 3 months old. From using Travis CI, I’ve learnt the huge value of continuous integration right from the start. Thank you, it’s greatly improved the quality of open-source software!
But rule 2 means I will now have to use a CI from elsewhere.
When the project gets to 3 months old, I’m very unlikely to switch back to Travis once I’ve put the effort into setting up the other CI. Sadly, this new rule means Travis will never be the first choice for open source.
Since an allotment is given to an account rather than a project, I guess this only matters if it’s a fresh account and you don’t have any other project to leech OSS credits from.