On April 7, 1998, Terry Weissman announced the creation of bugzilla.mozilla.org, a new bug tracking system for keeping track of bugs in the Mozilla code base.
Bugzilla is here. Â She’s very young, and fragile. Â But if you treat her kindly, she’ll remember your bug reports for you. Â When she grows up a little, she’ll become invaluable in helping track what is actually being done to the codebase.
On April 15th, a mere 8 days later, the first person requested the source code.
I like bugzilla! Â Its cool! Â If I wanted to use it for my own (non-Mozilla) project, how can I go about getting a copy?
But alas, it was still a proprietary Netscape product at the time. In fact, we learn from Terry in that thread:
you need to be aware that it is built on top of the Kiva application server stuff, and on top of a database (I think it’s an Oracle database). Neither of these things are free.
Wow. Not only were they not free, they were expensive. Kiva cost about $35,000 at the time, and Oracle… if you had to ask, it was too much. :) Not only that, but:
first we’d have to convince the folks here at Netscape who wrote it (not me) that this is something they want to do. Â That might to be doable, but it hasn’t been attempted yet. Â It’s always possible that someone at Netscape has plans to make money off of selling that code.
But that request apparently bore fruit. On August 26, 1998, with this post, Terry Weissman announced that a new completely rewritten version of Bugzilla had been deployed on bugzilla.mozilla.org. What’s more, this new version included the source code being available for download, and it ran under Apache using MySQL for the database.
The first checkin to CVS was at 11:15pm PDT, August 25, 1998.
Happy 10th anniversary to the open source Bugzilla Project!