[quickthrower2]

Contrarian point of view: why do we “need” free CI? Open source can run CI locally on docker etc. The free CI is marketing for the CI companies. Don’t offer free compute. We need to train the industry in general to pay for trials. Some companies eg those in the SEO vertical manage to do this. Ahrefs for example.

[lifeofguenter]

Running something locally is not necessarily free either. Even if maybe the "host" is for free (which I can not imagine, unless someone throw something at you), it will still require your time to setup and ensure its running.

For private/small open source projects I would highly welcome such a pricing tier from travis-ci but 69USD is just not in my pocket (not saying its unjustified though!).

For larger open-source projects that rely on many builds throughout the day/month, this might be a bigger problem.

So while its "free" marketing, it might be much more crucial to our open-source structure than we think it is (which might be a problem as well).

And I think we can all agree: open source software is an important part not only for the industry but our lives :)

[mellyjelly]

This is part of the reason open source is so important, but should be enough on its own to argue that free services should exist: these CI services have been an important piece of education, which should be free.

[quickthrower2]

I use a bunch of different CI at work and they are great but if they are offline you are stuffed as they are not portable and running local while possible is a nightmare.

Containers are a solution for this right? If I was open source I’d run CI in docker or similar so you can easily run it locally or on a server.

The assumption is people doing FOSS can’t afford maybe $20 a year to spend on some kind of elastic compute to run this or don’t have a computer powerful enough to run it. I doubt this is the case and if it is just do without CI - just run your tests from IDE before pushing to master.

[lacker]

I mean we don't need it, society can survive without free CI, but it is nice. I'm happy to get free CI for an open source project in return for the CI company marketing to me a bit about how great their product is.