By the way, whatever you write to support they always reply with that same autogenerated message.
No matter what you write. I asked for an allotment and got this. I inquired about the education program and got this. There is no human on the other side of the communication.
We are migrating dozens of FOSS projects to other services as quick as we can. It is incredibly sad to see Travis CI FOSS commitment die like this. I was also using it as exemplar integrator in university courses (master and phds) and will now need to modify all my study material.
Competing with GHA is hard, but Travis definitely had a better pipeline organization. It is a competition that could have been won technologically.
My feeling is that the current owners are taking a well-known product and trying to squeeze all the possible money out of it, maybe hoping that the migration cost would be so high such that many preferred to stay and pay.
I personally think that the FOSS friendliness has been the main driver pushing Travis CI adoption. I would never have considered using (and teaching!) it otherwise, and I believe many others. As such, I believe the current strategy is very short sighted ā but of course, Iām external and this is just my perception.
What I find unacceptable, and will most definitely make me stay away from every possible Idera product, is the lack of planning and communication. No one is required to give away free services, ever. But if you ever do, you should do so honestly, not claiming that support will be free for FOSS āforeverā, or that such support is still there. Itās not. And if you change your mind along the way, which is something you have the right to do, you should be clear about that, and possibly also provide a time for an exit strategy.
I would have very much appreciated a honest email, a few months ago, telling me āwe are progressively shutting down travis.org, starting October and ending at the end of the year; and we are deleting our current free tier offer for FOSS and educational projects, switching to a trial plan; the switch will happen on November 2ndā.
Having had something like this around June would have avoided a lot of the current pain.
Could you elaborate? I wrote to support@ previously, and an āautogenerated messageā I received merely confirmed receipt of my request. If you go to support.travis-ci.com, you can see your requests and their status (youāll need to reset your password first via the e-mail address you wrote from to be able to log in).
Of course, if a human didnāt reply to you in a timely manner, that makes no difference if you canāt use Travis until they doā¦
Okay, thatās certainly not a robot even though the response is a canned one (and misses the point in this case).
Iād either follow up pointing out they got you wrong (e.g. smth like this: "There seems to be a misunderstanding. Iām not supposed to be applying for an OSS credits allotment because my organization <your org name> should already have unlimited access under an educational license agreement.
Is our educational license now void (we got no notice whatsoever)? If so, please state so explicitly.")
or move on as you did and state your dissatisfaction with the answer in the support feedback form (you get another automated letter when your ticket is closed).
Iāve sent several messages over the past couple of weeks, asking about how I can get credit allotments for the projects Iām active in, but never got any reply - not even that canned one.
Sadly, one project (NUT, the Network UPS Tools) was just in the midst of increasing coverage and eradicating bugs found by linters in newer compilers, taking advantage of multi-platform testing provided by Travis CI during this year. So each build cycle costs 1-2 hours CPU time depending on scope of test (dictated by branch name), and during this spree there were dozens of builds per day on an otherwise mature and relatively dormant project. Thanks to Travis, hundreds of warnings no longer happen. No-thanks to Travis, not sure if we would be able to keep the codebase clean and non-regressed across a wide range of OSes and CPUs as easily as we could now.
Switched a maintainer and a CI account to .COM, the queued builds that waited for over a day on .ORG blew through the 10k credits blazing fast, now those accounts are in the negative values. Every day the āPlanā tab āCreditsā sub-tab says like ā-1840 available credits (purchase date: November 28, 2020)ā and āOSS Only Creditsā sub-tab states ā0 available credits (next replenish date: November 28, 2020)ā (substitute the current day you are looking at this).
Huh I donāt understand, is Travis just plain lying now?
āOpen source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.comā
Does not match the information on the pricing page. Or maybe it does.
Hereās what we think we know: Open source projects which meet certain criteria (including nobody getting paid to work on it) can apply for a set number of free credits, when they expire they can apply for more. There are only so many total credits available to be divied out to open source applicants.
What Iām confused about, is this what Paul Gordon means by āOpen source accounts, as always, will be completely freeā, like he thinks that is ācompletely freeā?
Or is he describing something else and there is some miscommunication or misunderstanding, either inside of Travis, or we are wrong in our understanding of whatās being offered?
To an extent, the criteria in the ānon-commercial open-source projectsā sort of makes sense. If the person or team making the project ends up actually making money off it, it is honest to share with the projects that help get it done, such as Travis.
There is a gray zone with many projects that can be sold, or services about them sold (GPL et al do not prohibit that, and discussions decades ago encouraged that - leading to companies behind many Linux distros getting money for something other people created and shared for free). Notably these can be or not be different people, those doing the work and those collecting money for it. There may be or not be some tips or donations to actual original developers coming back from those who legally take the raw materials to build a product. This is also not too different from product builders using Travis services (originally for free), but to make a product to sell and make money from it.
The problems I see here are with original developers tinkering on a codebase and maybe not having any monetary gains from that, who never know if someone else takes that and sells it. (And also, probably nobody outside really knows what happens or not behind the curtains). For Travis audit, is that a commercial project or not?
There are also many cases where companies do use OSS projects for their products, and in good faith commit fixes and improvements - made by paid developers as part of their dayjob - back to those common free upstreams. (At the very least, companies do that in order to not to have to maintain and resync a fork with such fixes, in case of GPL - a public fork anyway). For Travis audit, does collaboration like this taint a project so it ābecomesā commercial or not?
Also there are many projects that originally post some code and want it tested. With the criteria limiting to projects active and at least 3 months old, they surely cut off some impostors who want a quick bot-net or a crypto-mining facility, but also they cut off any valid start-ups. These would likely start with GitHub actions or some other solutions and never look at Travis after they already have something else working. Well, maybe the multi-arch/multi-distro part would still be a good point to keep looking at Travis.
Mine says āPlease note that additional add-ons are not available for this plan. Please see our documentation for more details on allowances in Free Plan.ā
So presumably you have to ask to be transitioned to the open source plan? People here are not making it sound like thatās productive.
Finding myself rather suddenly in the category of āYou have used 13520 of 10000 creditsā doesnāt inspire confidence in a billing system. To firstly not know youāre being charged, and suddenly find out youāre charged far beyond the limit you didnāt know you hadā¦ isnāt making me want to give that party my credit card number.
In the past, regardless of qualifying under their open source rules, Iād not have thought all that much of sending them $15/mo for the serviceā¦even just to save the time converting. But this transition really kind of defines how not to stay in good standing with open source. So Iāll decline asking for the open source monthly creditsā¦Idera doesnāt look like anyone I want to be dealing with either way.
This is really a tragedy for Travisāwhich I had at one time cited as a small example of where software was actually getting better.
But rather than kneejerk jump to GitHub Actions where the same thing could happenā¦Iāll see what I can learn about the alternatives that can be self hosted if need be (Drone CI?)
I migrated away all my projects, including the one I payed for, to GitHub Actions. I guess thatās thatās what they really want, drastically reduce their costs for OSS.
Itās perfectly fine for them to stop their (used-to-be-awesome) free service, but the communication around it is very disappointing.
Another one of the displeasedā¦
I maintain a relatively small scale OSS project, and weāve been using Travis for years to auto-generate nightly builds and to auto-build the translated copies of our website. (Hugo / Github pages)
The handling of this is completely messed up.
Like many of the posters up-thread, I wouldnāt mind nearly so much if there was a clear and open handling of whatās going on.
As soon as I got the messge, I provided the requied info & I got some credits temporarily added, and from there Iāve heard nothing since.
In principle, Iād much rather not shift CI systems, as Travis gives me regression testing on older Mono versions and other nice bits, but I feel Iām being pushed into this.
At present, Iām vainly hanging on in the hope that things work themselves out, but with the way things are going I really donāt see much chance of thisā¦
