Bugzilla: 10 years ago today
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. She’s very young, and fragile. But if you treat her kindly, she’ll remember your bug reports for you. 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! Its cool! 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. That might to be doable, but it hasn’t been attempted yet. 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!
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Bugzilla in the News and Blogs- Bugzilla Monday, 11 May 2009, 9:01 am
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Bugzilla lately has been going through a bit of a redesign process. Guy Pyrzak has been leading the initiative and has been making some very useful observations and changes. For instance, he observed. […] - Email: Still the One for Developers - LinuxInsider.com Wednesday, 22 April 2009, 4:02 am
Email: Still the One for DevelopersLinuxInsider.com, CABugzilla is about the best they can get." If a Twitter-like feature were integrated in SCM applications, Hammond said, it would probably be welc. […] - Jesse Ruderman » Getting bugs done Monday, 20 April 2009, 11:18 am
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So we've gotten lots of great feedback on the homepage, it's been really helpful and we're talking to folks about redoing the icons, making sure that the big icons are the right choice and much more.. […] - New front page for Bugzilla 3.4 Thursday, 16 April 2009, 4:50 am
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Bugzillaプロジェクトでは、Bugzilla 3.2.3, 3.3.4をリリースいたしました。Bugzilla 3.2.3は最新の安定版リリースとなります。また、3.4リリースに向け、BRANCH_. […]
- Bugzilla Monday, 11 May 2009, 9:01 am
[...] Reference #1 and #2 [...]
Wow, nostalgia. Thanks for noticing the date; I never would have. You have no idea how good it makes me feel to see Bugzilla still going strong. Many thanks to you and all the other contributors who have kept it going.
- Terry