I’ve had a similar awakening a few months when realising that GitHub shows you the cost of free-for-open-source Actions usage.
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RE: https://grrl.me/@soph/116586772000163018
I’ve had a similar awakening a few months when realising that GitHub shows you the cost of free-for-open-source Actions usage. On of my decidedly low-traffic but big test suite (173 checks) would cost thousands of dollars per month.
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that they’ve played us all for fools. We all have infinitely fast dev machines, but we need to rent a dev machine’s worth of servers every month to run an open source project?
Absolutely not.
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RE: https://grrl.me/@soph/116586772000163018
I’ve had a similar awakening a few months when realising that GitHub shows you the cost of free-for-open-source Actions usage. On of my decidedly low-traffic but big test suite (173 checks) would cost thousands of dollars per month.
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that they’ve played us all for fools. We all have infinitely fast dev machines, but we need to rent a dev machine’s worth of servers every month to run an open source project?
Absolutely not.
The consequence for me is working on and supporting CI solutions thay can be run anywhere and still provide a reliable build environment.
I’m so done with everything we do is renting a variable markup on the cost of AWS, Azure or GCP.
There is not reason we shouldn’t be able to (paraphrasing) run `brew install ci-server` and have a system stood up that can run tests under almost any OS/arch/env combination on any* dev box.
*macOS licensing complicates things, but the point stands.
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RE: https://grrl.me/@soph/116586772000163018
I’ve had a similar awakening a few months when realising that GitHub shows you the cost of free-for-open-source Actions usage. On of my decidedly low-traffic but big test suite (173 checks) would cost thousands of dollars per month.
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that they’ve played us all for fools. We all have infinitely fast dev machines, but we need to rent a dev machine’s worth of servers every month to run an open source project?
Absolutely not.
@janl I wonder if contemporary CI is something we overbuilt. Is software so fragile that we need a giant integration matrix? Do checks need to be run so frequently that we can act like coding is now a just a rush to deliver and move on style activity? Reflecting on the era of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, when did business interests overtake community interests?
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@janl I wonder if contemporary CI is something we overbuilt. Is software so fragile that we need a giant integration matrix? Do checks need to be run so frequently that we can act like coding is now a just a rush to deliver and move on style activity? Reflecting on the era of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, when did business interests overtake community interests?
@cararemixed I’m in a situation where the software really does need a wide matrix that’s more than a typical project needs, but that could reflect on the enironments they run on aren’t well enough standardised, so yeah, bit of both?
Re do we need to run all tests: shouldn’t ststic analysis allow us only to run the tests that depend on the source code we changed? (won’t work for everything, mostly external state, but could help a lot otherwise?)
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@cararemixed I’m in a situation where the software really does need a wide matrix that’s more than a typical project needs, but that could reflect on the enironments they run on aren’t well enough standardised, so yeah, bit of both?
Re do we need to run all tests: shouldn’t ststic analysis allow us only to run the tests that depend on the source code we changed? (won’t work for everything, mostly external state, but could help a lot otherwise?)
@janl I'm not discounting running tests but maybe I'm starting to question platforms which fail to provide basic portability and the focus on PR builds over patch reviews. I think reviewers actually testing patches under review locally is underrated (like reproducing scientific results, it is time consuming but good). CI shouldn't have negated the need for that.
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@janl I'm not discounting running tests but maybe I'm starting to question platforms which fail to provide basic portability and the focus on PR builds over patch reviews. I think reviewers actually testing patches under review locally is underrated (like reproducing scientific results, it is time consuming but good). CI shouldn't have negated the need for that.
@cararemixed yup!
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RE: https://grrl.me/@soph/116586772000163018
I’ve had a similar awakening a few months when realising that GitHub shows you the cost of free-for-open-source Actions usage. On of my decidedly low-traffic but big test suite (173 checks) would cost thousands of dollars per month.
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that they’ve played us all for fools. We all have infinitely fast dev machines, but we need to rent a dev machine’s worth of servers every month to run an open source project?
Absolutely not.
@janl How low is low traffic in your case? (Some of my projects are running tests 2x/month these days
I should check the cost report, but that would cost me pennies on self hosting) -
@cararemixed I’m in a situation where the software really does need a wide matrix that’s more than a typical project needs, but that could reflect on the enironments they run on aren’t well enough standardised, so yeah, bit of both?
Re do we need to run all tests: shouldn’t ststic analysis allow us only to run the tests that depend on the source code we changed? (won’t work for everything, mostly external state, but could help a lot otherwise?)
@janl @cararemixed In theory static analysis can (often) do that, but in practice it often turns out to be extremely difficult to pin down what depends on what. At least in my experience.
Google tried to automate this and they got Bazel
(one of the most complex pieces of software I've ever worked with) -
The consequence for me is working on and supporting CI solutions thay can be run anywhere and still provide a reliable build environment.
I’m so done with everything we do is renting a variable markup on the cost of AWS, Azure or GCP.
There is not reason we shouldn’t be able to (paraphrasing) run `brew install ci-server` and have a system stood up that can run tests under almost any OS/arch/env combination on any* dev box.
*macOS licensing complicates things, but the point stands.
@janl In my opinion: They haven't played *us* for fools, they are fooling themselves and their shareholders. To me it currently seems there will be no way to turn the world of centralised "Big AI" into a sustainable business model. I have moved my repos and build stuff to Forgejo, with 3 little Lenovo Tiny PCs at home that run as CI builders using forgejo actions.
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@janl In my opinion: They haven't played *us* for fools, they are fooling themselves and their shareholders. To me it currently seems there will be no way to turn the world of centralised "Big AI" into a sustainable business model. I have moved my repos and build stuff to Forgejo, with 3 little Lenovo Tiny PCs at home that run as CI builders using forgejo actions.
@jwildeboer @janl this is where I see the value of local-first CI. Which should always have been prioritized, but of course runs against the lock-in strategy of shitty corps like Github^Wmsft.
One promising example:
https://ambient.liw.fi/ -
@janl I wonder if contemporary CI is something we overbuilt. Is software so fragile that we need a giant integration matrix? Do checks need to be run so frequently that we can act like coding is now a just a rush to deliver and move on style activity? Reflecting on the era of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, when did business interests overtake community interests?
@cararemixed number of builds run is a terrible metric, not only due to resource waste.
@janl -
@janl How low is low traffic in your case? (Some of my projects are running tests 2x/month these days
I should check the cost report, but that would cost me pennies on self hosting)@diazona it’s a bit bursty, so averaging is tough
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The consequence for me is working on and supporting CI solutions thay can be run anywhere and still provide a reliable build environment.
I’m so done with everything we do is renting a variable markup on the cost of AWS, Azure or GCP.
There is not reason we shouldn’t be able to (paraphrasing) run `brew install ci-server` and have a system stood up that can run tests under almost any OS/arch/env combination on any* dev box.
*macOS licensing complicates things, but the point stands.
Way back when, or in fact in 2026 for some projects, people would get a mailing list message to try the most recent tests. Some similar kind of "make test" seems to be what you are talking about? Or does it specifically have to be a bespoke CI in a box?
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@jwildeboer @janl this is where I see the value of local-first CI. Which should always have been prioritized, but of course runs against the lock-in strategy of shitty corps like Github^Wmsft.
One promising example:
https://ambient.liw.fi/@fedops @jwildeboer @janl They all went away again or enshittified ... thinking of Dagger and earthly, there are probably countless more.
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RE: https://grrl.me/@soph/116586772000163018
I’ve had a similar awakening a few months when realising that GitHub shows you the cost of free-for-open-source Actions usage. On of my decidedly low-traffic but big test suite (173 checks) would cost thousands of dollars per month.
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that they’ve played us all for fools. We all have infinitely fast dev machines, but we need to rent a dev machine’s worth of servers every month to run an open source project?
Absolutely not.
@janl TBF, FreeBSD has their own fleet farm to build ports. It a regular problem to fund machines for it.
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@janl TBF, FreeBSD has their own fleet farm to build ports. It a regular problem to fund machines for it.
@mms we have donated hardware for CouchDB as well.
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Way back when, or in fact in 2026 for some projects, people would get a mailing list message to try the most recent tests. Some similar kind of "make test" seems to be what you are talking about? Or does it specifically have to be a bespoke CI in a box?
@zygmyd we do this for CouchDB, but our CI has a wider platform matrix
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@janl TBF, FreeBSD has their own fleet farm to build ports. It a regular problem to fund machines for it.
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@fedops @jwildeboer @janl They all went away again or enshittified ... thinking of Dagger and earthly, there are probably countless more.
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