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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or has the entire Open Source/Free Software movement(s) been replaced by simple proprietary tools "in beta" pushed by profiteering young coders looking to start a micro-business oriented towards their peers? The great majority of these tools could be [and often are] written in a weekend, which is why it confuses me they'd be trying to sell it to someone.

As soon as I see a shiny, polished web page with lots of highlights and no details, I now assume it's a shill for money without any meaningful content. I'm right more often than not. Oh, startup culture!

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Hi peter,

Thanks for taking the time to give us some feedback!

Jenknis has been around forever, and probably will be. It's one of those pieces of software that just keeps on going. Like the movie Grease - sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still pretty damn good - and future generations will still watch it.

People will still write these tools in a weekend - and that's totally cool! They don't have to use Buildbox if they don't want to.

There are varying skill levels out there. Some devs are really happy to install Ruby on Ubuntu, but often have gripes installing Jenkins, managing permissions, etc. And for those "young coders" - Jenkins looks very dated. It's very difficult to navigate, and managing plugins is usually a pain.

Buildbox is a middle-ground between managing Jenkins, and having your CI run entirely for you in the cloud by other services.

Cheers,

Keith from Buildbox

I could be wrong, but from where I'm standing, it's just you.

Most major web applications built today thrive on a large, active ecosystem of open-source tools. Rails, Django, Play and Compojure all require the active participation of a large community of interested developers to keep them thriving and healthy. The author of the linked tool, who is a good dude, himself has a notable open source track record. I don't see any of this going away anytime soon.

I used to maintain the Ruby version of CruiseControl, the original open-source CI tool. There's plenty of room for everyone here.

There is room for both.

There are open source alternatives to this service, which a couple of folks on this thread have already pointed out.

However, not all teams are scaled to run and maintain a Jenkins server so there is certainly a need for such services. Often the price point is low enough that I am happy to get myself out of the business of maintaining infrastructure so that I can focus on the product I'm building.

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