Did you follow the Cypress/Currents drama?

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I was looking back into the whole Cypress/Currents debacle…

Specifically this post is genuinley the most business+community “drama” post in the world of testing I’ve seen in years.

Cypress vs. the world

Cypress is, as most here might know, a frontend test automation tool for regression testing of web apps.

Cypress started offering a paid web application, Cypress cloud.

The community thought this wasn’t good enough, so some company called Currents.dev built a self-hosted, alternative dashboard for recording and debugging tests fully open sourced.
Anyone can go and download this and host it by themselves.
It’s called Sorry-Cypress: https://sorry-cypress.dev/
Funnily enough Currents.dev ALSO provides a hosted version of this open source tech, for a smaller price than Cypress Cloud

2 years later

About 2 years later, Cypress decided to ban the usage of sorry-cypress as a 3rd party plugin starting with Cypress v13.
They cite in their blog post the reasons for doing this, specifically talking about how the company that builds Sorry-Cypress, has used their name and deceptive techniques to get their alternative dashboard (and thus their paid offer too) to become popular!

I was curious what your take is on this whole situation?
Do you still have confidence in Cypress to do the right thing going forward or are they just trying to protect their business?
Share your opinion if you have one :slight_smile:

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CypressIO, the company, is a venture backed startup. They’ve raised money, which means they need to build a business large enough to reward investors at many multiples of what they invested.

They’ve used part of that money to build a free / open source product. The other part to build a revenue generating platform. It only makes sense that anything which threatens their primary business will get banned. This isn’t surprising, or even controversial.

Having said this, I bet many users of Cypress’s open source tools aren’t fully aware of the VC backed nature of the company and the impacts that will have on the tools.

In the end I expect Cypress to keep doing their thing. Anything that threatens their business or their ability to grow will end up like this other plugin.

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Huh. Neat. I wondered how long it would take Cypress to go after sorry-cypress.

I do think Cypress has invited some of this by making it harder and harder to not use their paid platform. Cypress v13, for example, requires doing extra work to keep recording videos–the only replacement is a Cypress Cloud feature.

Personally, I’ve not used any of the above. We just run our Cypress tests in Jenkins.

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I was disappointed in cypress really, their paid version isn’t cheap.

We tried this and it seems to work Alternative Cypress Binaries - Currents Documentation but it will only last until cypress block mirrors

They are aware people use sorry-cypress so feel they should have offered an alternative rather than kill it completely.

From their article it did seem like if sorry-cypress had used another name this wouldn’t have been an issue.

To be fair, that makes sense. But it did look like they had changed the name to currents.dev.

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While I do understand they need to make money, I don’t think banning certain 3rd party plugins would get them far. It just makes people angry, and damage to their reputation is far greater than what they will get back through few more paying users.

Having said that, if I had to choose automation tool and saw they tend to ban things they don’t like, I’d probably go for some other tool that respects and supports it’s 3rd-party ecosystem.

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