Chromatic has used Travis CI for nearly five years for our continuous integration needs; building every pull request, checking our changes against code standards, running automated tests, etc. On March 12, 2019, we canceled our Travis subscription and began running our builds elsewhere. Why make a change now? It’s simple, really.
In January 2019 Travis CI announced that they were being acquired by Idera Inc; news that at the time was just a small blip on our radar, but approximately one month later, word got out that Idera was laying off a large portion of Travis’s senior technical staff in what has been described as an effort to “strip-mine” the company’s profits, aka “vulture capitalism.” The limited communication from Idera’s CEO[1] during this time was vague and defensive, for example:
As a policy, we do not respond to speculation or observations from people who doubt our resolve. Past experience affirms debating speculation and emotion do not serve our interests or our customers.
While there is surely a practical aspect to our decision to leave Travis (actions such as these don’t bode well for the future development of the Travis product), ultimately, it boiled down to the fact that we don’t want to support organizations or services that are not investing in, or are being openly hostile to, their team members.
We want to thank the Travis team members who played a part in building a product that was useful to us for several years and hope you have landed somewhere exciting for your next chapter.
Footnotes
Sadly, this was only sent as an email and not published elsewhere. The only place I can find it in full on the web is reprinted in a Travis forum post. ↩︎
