Official Notice to the Community Regarding CircleCI

[raman-m]

From: Ocelot Core team

Ocelot's previous CI/CD provider, CircleCI, facilitated professional and seamless development, build processes, and delivery of Ocelot versions for seven years, starting in March 2018. But last year, in January 2025, after patching Ocelot with version 23.4.3, our team encountered legal issues related to CircleCI Co's policies, leading to this CI/CD provider stopping the build process for the Ocelot project. This legal issue and technical incident were unforeseen on our part because Ocelot is open-source software (OSS), and forcibly stopping the project's build process and blocking accounts appears to be an unfortunate breach of OSS principles. We strongly believe that any developer or user, from any country, should be able to use software providers that support the OSS movement by offering free or other cost-free plans and serving the accounts of these users, OSS teams, and OSS projects 24/7, 365 days a year. We consider this legal issue and the resulting technical incidents involving CircleCI to be a serious breach of OSS principles and an act of discrimination against Ocelot users, developers, and customers who rely on Ocelot OSS, ultimately causing delays to the current release. As a team, we do not recommend using CircleCI for OSS projects, as there is no guarantee that these projects will not face discrimination from this U.S. company.

For all developers, team leads, architects, and managers of any OSS projects—at least on GitHub—we recommend utilizing the built-in GitHub Actions CI/CD infrastructure. Since its founding, GitHub has supported OSS projects. Today, GitHub provides 2,000 minutes of free CI/CD build time per month for OSS repositories (public repos, GitHub Free plan). Also, we strongly believe that GitHub will never violate its OSS policies without a notice period, nor fail to inform owners and maintainers that certain policies must be met by Ocelot's owners. In addition, we want to acknowledge that we are monitoring U.S. government regulations. Unfortunately, we must state that some GitHub products are unavailable in certain countries, even if the project is OSS and GitHub claims these products are free for OSS. Since the Ocelot team does not utilize these non-critical products (we prefer to energize our brains rather than rely on AI-driven products), and since the Ocelot project is currently well-served by GitHub Co, the Ocelot team affirms that Ocelot will remain on GitHub as long as its OSS-friendly policies continue. As a team, we hope that GitHub will never enforce extra rules on our project or other OSS projects.
Regardless, we remain on GitHub!

Notice Signed By:

• Tom Pallister, Owner, Founder
• Raman Maksimchuk, Owner, Project Coordinator
• Raynald Messié, Repository Maintainer
• Guillaume Gnaegi, Key Contributor

Signed between April 15–18, 2025, as part of pull request #2286 and through email communication.