(I find it extremely sketchy from a competition law perspective that Microsoft, as the owner of npm, has implemented a policy banning npm publishers from publishing via competitors to GitHub Actions - a product that Microsoft also owns. But they have; that is the reality right now, whether it's legal or not.)

(It can also be extended to arbitrary third party IdPs, although the benefit of that is dependent on usage. But if you have another CI/CD provider that you’d like to integrate into PyPI, you should definitely flag it on the issue tracker.)

How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?

The opposite, to be lazy and to continue giving them money whilst being unhappy with what you get in return, would actually be more like defending the companies.

The opposite we see here: to not criticize them; to blame Microsoft's failure on the critics; and even to discourage any such criticism, are actually more like defending large companies.

This especially includes governments and other institutional buyers.

Honestly I think the problem is more a rosy view of the past versus any actual change in behavior. There have always been defenders of such companies.

They hired a ton of people on very very good salaries

You better thank god for MS for being lazy and incompetent, the last thing we want for big tech is being innovative and have a stronger monopoly

Their size or past misbehaviors shouldn't be relevant to this discussion. Bringing those up feels a bit like an ad hominem. Whether criticism is valid should depend entirely on how GitHub Actions actually works and how it compares to similar services.

If the past misbehaviours are exactly the same shape, there's not all that much point re-hashing the same discussion with the nouns renamed.

Here we are talking about one of the worlds most valuable companies that gets all sorts of perks, benefits and preferential treatment from various entities and governments on the globe and somehow we have to be grateful when they deliver garbage while milking the business they bought.

And besides that, a lot of people on here do pay for Github in the first place.

I used to work for a Japanese company, and one of their core philosophies was “Don’t complain, unless you have a solution.” In my experience, this did not always have optimal outcomes: https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/

So I’m part of the problem? Me specifically?

Just refuse to do my job because I think the tools suck?

Once I'm encharged of budge decisions of my company I'll make sure that none will go to any MS and Atlassian product. Until then I'll keep complaining.

I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.

For some examples of more advanced usecases take a look: https://circleci.com/blog/platform-toolkit/

Disclaimer: i work for CircleCI.

Also, honestly, I don't care about any of those features. The main thing I want is a CI system that is fast and customisable and that I don't have to spend a lot of time debugging. I think CircleCI is pretty decent in that regard (the "rerun with SSH" thing is way better than anything else I've seen) but it doesn't seem to be getting any better over time (e.g. caching is still very primitive and coarse-grained).

Github Actions is actually one of the better CI options out there, even if on an absolute scale it is still pretty bad.

As far as I can tell nobody has made a CI system that is actually good.

really surprised there are no others though. dagger.io was in the space but the level of complexity is an order of magnitude higher

Don't waste your time

What that type of section usually means is "there's someone from Microsoft that signed up for our service using his work account", sometimes it means "there's some tiny team within Microsoft that uses our product", but it very rarely (if ever) means "the entire company is completely reliant on our product".