Only a few weeks ago they wrote a letter (https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement) that said "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com."
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.
I wonder how many people start out making pledges like that because they wish other companies would and they want to be the change they wish to see in the world. And they don’t realize that taking investor money means you no longer have the power to keep your promises even if you want to because you’re promising with other people’s money.
When I started an organization which was taken over in a rather hostile way, I was very careful to make a bunch of legally-binding promises before the takeover happened, to help prevent it from becoming too evil.
> When I started an organization which was taken over in a rather hostile way, I was very careful to make a bunch of legally-binding promises before the takeover happened, to help prevent it from becoming too evil.
I'm glad you had the presence of mind to do this and I'd be interested to hear your hostile takeover story. Thanks in advance.
It's probably too soon. Over the course of my career, I've encountered a significant number of really juicy stories that I tend not to explain, as there's a lot to lose and not very much to gain.
Traditionally, the purpose of autobiography is to tell all of these stories.
I've got enough potential liability piled up there that I think some of these stories will only come out once I'm good and dead. Not just legal liability -- although I did sign an NDA/non-disparage -- bringing up dirt from past businesses is like mudwrestling with a pig: everyone ends up looking dirty.
In this case, I'm glad to say I acted with complete integrity at every point, but knowing the parties involved, we'd end up in a cesspool of rumors and falsehoods, and no one would come out looking clean.
Live. Learn. Move onto the next business. Give advice in generics. Some people will believe you, and others won't.
IANAL, but I don't think that would be applicable in this case:
> Another requirement further qualifies the required detriment component; the promisee must have suffered an actual substantial detriment in the form of an economic loss that results from the promisor failing to deliver on his or her promise. Finally, promissory estoppel is usually only granted if a court determines that enforcing the promise is essentially the only means by which injustice to the promisee can be rectified.
The open source project would not suffer an economic loss by not using Travis. They would be free to stop using Travis or go to another competitor providing a free plan.
Exceptions to the above I can think of:
* Travis didn't charge them, then started charging them despite the promise
* they suffer an unrelated economic loss because they stop using CI
* they're forced to hire someone to convert them to another CI system (economic loss in form of wages, money to operate their own CI), though the loss would have t obe substantial (is that relative? e.g. in case of a low budget, is even a small sum substantial?)
IANAL either, but I think, if someone were to take it to court, it would:
1) Travis achieved a market-dominant position in part thanks to widespread use by open source projects.
2) Open source projects invested significant resources into integrating with Travis based on their promise.
3) Moving to something else would take significant resources. The exact loses are probably exactly how much it would cost to pay to continue to use Travis (and collecting some of that money is precisely why Travis stopped offering a free service). If it wasn't significant, Travis wouldn't have made the change.
That doesn't mean it's worth anyone's time to litigate.
As a footnote, the traditional way to handle something like this is to continue to provide a free service, but to make it worse and worse and worse. Travis could satisfice the promise by keeping an insecure Raspberry Pi under someone's desk running old code as the "server farm" for open source. Courts don't necessarily consider satisificing to be following through on a promise, but costs of litigation go way up when there are open legal questions like that. At that point, it's usually almost definitely not worth anyone's time to litigate.
My previous company was on Travis, and as soon as I saw that Travis was purchased by private equity, I knew the downward spiral had begun and I recommended we move to something else. Not surprised that this is happening a couple of years later...my understanding is that private equity will tend towards slowing/stopping development after acquisition to cut costs/headcount, and then squeeze the remaining value from what's left, so this is in-line with that playbook.
Are there any evidence of private equity providing benefits for society? Sometimes it looks like they have a inverse Midas hand, everything they touch putrefy.
There's this meme that private equity companies are vultures circling overhead looking for prey, and when they find a poor innocent victim they swoop in and destroy it. I worked at a PE firm in the past, and my understanding was that the companies we bought were all looking for buyers because they were already failing. So a company that would otherwise have to close looks to the PE markets for help. The PE firms say, ok - we'll buy you out and then we'll require you to change your business so that you become profitable. The stated goal was to buy a struggling business, fix it up, and then sell it a few years later. Didn't always work, obviously.
In any case, the failure starts with an unsustainable business model. Travis CI management set up a business that ultimately failed to the point where they needed to be rescued by a PE firm. If you want to complain, complain to Travis CI management. They're the ones who failed you. The alternative to the PE buyout was not Travis CI continuing as it had always been. It was Travis CI closing shop.
(I don't really know the details of the Travis buyout. Maybe there are other factors at play. In just giving a perspective on how these things often work. )
Doesn't change the fact that being bought by a PE firm is a very bad sign for customers of the business.
For something easily switchable like your favorite retail shop you can - and should if you don't want the collapse to hasten - continue as before, but for something your business depends on like CI it's a huge red flag that you should switch to a different supplier.
You're getting the cause and effect backwards. Private equity generally buys companies that are already in rough shape and tries to turn them into something profitable (which often means a lot of cost cutting). That's an important part of the ecosystem. If anyone's harming society it's the VC ecosystem that gets companies hooked on free money and encourages them to burn it as fast as possible, blocking sustainable businesses from playing in that space.
> If anyone's harming society it's the VC ecosystem that gets companies hooked on free money and encourages them to burn it as fast as possible, blocking sustainable businesses from playing in that space.
It's even worse: VC "burn money" is way too often actively destroying and undercutting existing businesses in the guise of "disruption", and then once the competition is dead, prices rise to way higher than they ever were before.
Cases in point: Uber (destroying local taxis and then milking the customers dry with "surge fees"), AirBnB (literally "disrupting" all the neighbors around the illegal hotels), Facebook/Twitter (which competed with sustainable, moderated alternatives and now "disrupt" entire elections by allowing propaganda and lies unchecked), Doordash/Grubhub/whatever, they're all bad by actively MITMing and otherwise extorting restaurants, Yelp (again, extorting small businesses), Amazon (even though they're not using VC money, they're still burning down physical stores).
> and then once the competition is dead, prices rise to way higher than they ever were before
Though it hurts the current businesses, the high prices won't last long. New competitors will see the chance in same services with lower prices and they'll go in. The problem is actually regulation and lobbying, which making new players harder to emerge.
> The problem is actually regulation and lobbying, which making new players harder to emerge.
Regulation in many cases, especially in those I mentioned, makes sense:
- Taxis should not be allowed to discriminate for anything, especially not skin color. Also, at least in Germany the fares are regulated to ensure people are not ripped off in "hot times".
- Hotels, and most AirBnBs are de facto hotels, are regulated to prevent issues with fire safety, theft, privacy, noise complaints (it's illegal to build hotels in residential zones for a reason) and many others.
- Something like Grubhub putting their own intercepting phone number in Google results via shady SEO tactics and charging people for any call is just ripe for abuse by competitors, additionally it's extremely unfair.
I don't mean those kinds of regulation, some regulation are definitely needed for the better.
However there are some regulation that are made for the sole purpose of defending the existing players and keeping new players from coming into the market.
Some licenses have requirements like that, such as requiring some documents or certification before operating, meanwhile the existing players may not have them.
At the same time some of those market disruptions need to happen and the incumbents were probably never going to get there.
A single, open source, interface app needs to exist for co-coordinating 'radio cabs' and it needs to work for _all_ cities. Ubur/Lyft are somewhat close, but that market platform and co-ordination would never have happened without them.
Hotels / housing are an issue because of predatory monetary practices. As a society (at least in the US) we don't have planned community retirement, so anything expensive becomes a defacto investment vehicle. This leads to a preference for any policy that inflates the cost of housing, which directly leads to NIMBY and combines with anti-sprawl measures to constrain supply. At that point basic econ101 applies and prices just keep going up without ever correcting (anywhere jobs exist).
Social media and the other MITM attacks are probably symptoms of the same issue; yet I'm not quite sure what a true root cause and solution are. It might require personal AI secretaries or something similar that are interest aligned with the individual users, rather than any corporation or government. (To facilitate schedule arrangements that are optimal.)
> At the same time some of those market disruptions need to happen and the incumbents were probably never going to get there.
It is always a question: is this "disruption" worth the cost - minorities and the poor cut off from taxis, illegal hotel operations robbing people (again, in many cases poor and working class) of their sleep, and trust in democracy as a whole?
Disruption was necessary, these markets were already broken. The (current disruptions) listed (in what I replied to) weren't the correct form of disruption.
^^^ The correct short version of my statement above.
The PE firm that had a take in a company I worked for wasn't hostile. They held a pretty long term stake too from what I know about the history of the business.
I am not sure if it counts as providing a benefit to society but I think the Dell private equity process(taken private in 2013 and reintroduced to the public market in 2018) is generally considered a success from a business standpoint. As mentioned in sibling comments, a lot of private equity investments are an attempt to do something similar.
In the old days they provided growth equity to businesses that generally wouldn't have access to that capital. Now I'd say your observations are pretty much accurate.
It's possible that the CI market is just too competitive today and that resources allocated to Travis CI, including developer time, would be better spent elsewhere.
Like everything else in finance, they do good by making their investors money.
These investors then can use the money for fulfilling their purpose/charter/business plan.
For example, a school could use its endowment to give out scholarships, a pension fund pays out retirees, etc etc.
I would challenge the conceit that 'they do good by making their investors money.' They make their investors money, full-stop. Perhaps their investors choose to do good with that money, more likely, they choose to do business with that money. The private equity at no point ever did good through the act of making money, they did their job.
I think the thing here is that anyone can do good while making money- for instance, the longer-term PE groups mentioned around this thread that have respect from the companies they now own, or the factories that make sure that their employees are safe, paid well, and allow a work/life balance, or the finance companies that donate to charities and the like. The issue is that when money becomes the primary motivator for getting out of bed in the morning- and ethos and pathos get thrown out of the window entirely- you get companies who don't care about their employee's well-being or who don't care about the people on the other end of the line.
> Like everything else in finance, they do good by making their investors money.
During the financial crisis we saw that in finance, they do good by making their principals money. The investors can go F themselves if they're in the way.
Executives became dynastically rich by bankrupting their companies.
The heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG Financial Products, Dick Fuld and John Cassano are classic examples.
> Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees
> Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software
I don't think I have ever worked on any where there wasn't a single person writing code while getting paid by their employer. Is that enough to disqualify you from JetBrains criteria, do you think?
In email from travis support it was expressed as:
> Project must not be sponsored by a commercial company or organization (monetary or with employees paid to work on the project)
To me, that seems to say if someone commits code while on the clock, that is employees paid to work on the project.
That definitely disqualifies a huge number of open source projects, probably the majority, right?
I agree. Any open source project that's reasonably widely used is going to have some team from some commercial company submit a PR to fix some issue they're having at some point.
Why would this be a bad thing? Jetbrains is not a charity, and their free open source license is in order to support people who can't otherwise pay for a license, not to make another company's balance sheet look better on their dime.
They (neither jetbrains nor travis) don't need to give anything to anyone, true, so I don't know if it's a "bad thing" if they decide to give free things to some but not others.
I don't use jetbrains, it was brought up by analogy with travis. In Travis case, whether it's a "bad thing" or not, I think it's a dishonest thing to be claiming you provide "free service to open source projects" while introducing criteria that would exclude the majority of open source projects — which you also used to include but have switched to exclude while claiming you're doing the same as ever.
So it's clearly their perogative to set whatever criteria they like, it may or not be a "bad thing", but it is definitely a huge change from what they used to, and is only actually giving free service to a very small slice of open source projects, while publicly wanting to take credit for doing otherwise.
Our project is definitely open-source, but has an LF sub-project with a pretty decent amount of funding. We've been playing with the gitlab functionality, and was thinking it would be good to support a fellow open-source project financially, since we can.
But to move to one of the licensing models on their pricing page requires us to start to pay per-user. How many seats should we buy? I have no idea. Right now, if someone who's given one or two drive-by patches wants their own space on the project, we just give it to them. If it cost us an extra $50/year (or $240/year or $1200/year depending on our tier) for such users, what's the cut-off for who gets to be part of the project? It just changes the whole calculus.
If a company pays you to help maintain X then you can't use JetBrains but if your company lets you work on open source software, but not anything specific, during work hours then maybe you can still use it?
> Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees
> Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software
Jetbrains should really take it to the next level and require all developers on your open source project to provide up-to-date proof of unemployment benefits.
The personal use license can't be paid for by your employer though. (Though if a company is paying you for the OSS work, you can probably afford a personal license)
> A Personal license is an option for private individuals who purchase a license with their own funds, and solely for their own use. Personal licenses are not to be purchased, refunded or in any way financed by companies.
I think it is more likely that there is intense internal conflict around this decision, and some people may be openly reaffirming their beliefs in the mission of TravisCI.
It wasn't just a "website update", it was also a blog post by Paul Gordon, their Product Marketing Manager, about their enduring OSS support. Also, he outlines part of their mission in the post, if you're curious.
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.