It sounds like a bad deal right?

Except the alternative is I do this for free but also I'm doing all the testing and providing the hardware.

I'm only going to charge you if you do most of the work yourself

If you do it all, you can optimize the whole supply chain. Maybe you can put some expensive capacity you built to use and leverage it when otherwise impossible, etc.

Maybe it's bad business dealing with lots of non-standardized external hosts, and it drags you down.

Maybe people are abusing the free orchestration to do non-CI stuff and they're compromising legitimate users.

Look, I understand it's frustrating to some consumers. However, it's not irrational from GitHub's point of view.

This is actually about abusing Microsoft's market position to eliminate competitors in related markets, plain & simple.

if you were paying me a monthly license fee for each developer working on your repos, I'd probably consider it

What happens if I am, and now my developers suddenly start to produce changes much faster? Like, one developer now produces the volume of five.

Would you keep charging the same rate per head?

why wouldn't you? these are easily compressible text files. storing even like 100x into a 400 day (at most, the default for GH is 90) box is downright cheap to do on even massive scales.

it's 2025, for log files and a spicy cron daemon (you pay for the artifact storage), it's practically free to do so. this isn't like the days of Western Union where paying $0.35 to send some data across the world is a good deal

If that's the case, why all the fuzz?

All the people complaining can just tap into this almost-free and acessible cheap resource you are referring to instead.

we don't need it. we need to run our CI jobs on resources we manage ourselves, and GitHub have started charging per-minute for it. apples and cannonballs

no, I'd cut the monthly seat cost and grow my user base to include more low-volume devs

but realistically, publishing a web page is practically free. you could be sending 100x as much data and I would still be laughing all the way to the bank

Publishing the page is only the last step. It's orchestrating the stuff THEN publishing it.

If you think that's easy, do it for me. I have some projects to migrate, give me the link of your service.

> If you think that's easy

I think it's cheap to maintain. let me know how many devs you have, how many runs you do, and how many tests (by suite) you have, and I can do you up a quote for hosting some Allure reports. can spread the up-front costs over the 3-year monthly commitment if it helps

There are several services I know who offer this for free for open source software, and I really doubt any commercial offerings of that software would charge you extra for what is basic API usage.

But I get to read all your code and use it for training my AI, right?

My projects are public anyway. If you respect the license and make the AI comply to valid license reuse, I'm game.

> My projects are public anyway.

My point was that they profit from accessing your code, which is why they made it free in the first place. Now they make you pay because they believe they will make more profit. But they certainly weren't losing money before.

> If you respect the license and make the AI comply to valid license reuse

I think that the de facto situation is that AI does not have to know about licences or copyright at all. If they hack your computer to train their AI, the illegal part is that they hacked your computer, not that they trained their AI with the stolen data.

> I think that the de facto situation is that AI does not have to know about licences or copyright at all.

That is simply not true.

Companies can get into legal trouble if they don't.

Copilot does that bookeeping:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/get-code-suggesti...

> Companies can get into legal trouble if they don't.

Heard of Meta torrenting copyrighted material? What kind of trouble did they get into?