Support replied to my email.
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 wonder how the criteria were picked, frankly.