https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp
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.
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.
Pay a one time fee and get unlimited minutes forever, that would likely be binding.
But in this case, recipients of the freebie didn't have to offer anything to Travis in exchange.
Would or wouldn't you'll never know, looking at you HP, ink for life =?> ya right
> 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?)
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.
For example, a school could use its endowment to give out scholarships, a pension fund pays out retirees, etc etc.
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.
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).
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.)
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?
^^^ The correct short version of my statement above.
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.
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.
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.
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. )
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.
Is it worse than company collapsing though?
With that, you might not even have a warning sign.
Seems like it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zDTt0E...
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.
I think many would agree that moto has been broken several times over the years.