26. August 2023
posted by Dave Miller – Bugzilla Project Lead
Happy 25th Birthday to Bugzilla!
Today, August 26, marks the 25th anniversary of Bugzilla!
The first two paragraphs lifted from our Bugzilla history:
When mozilla.org first came online in 1998, one of the first products that
was released was Bugzilla, a bug system implemented using freely available
open source tools. Bugzilla was originally written in
TCL by Terry Weissman for use at mozilla.org
to replace the in-house system then in use at Netscape. The initial
installation of Bugzilla was deployed to the public on a mozilla.org server
on April 6, 1998.After a few months of testing and fixing on a public deployment, Bugzilla was
finally released as open source via anonymous CVS and available for others to
use on August 26, 1998. At
this point. Terry decided to port Bugzilla to Perl,
with the hopes that more people would be able to contribute to it, since Perl
seemed to be a more popular language. The completion of the port to Perl was
announced on September 15,
1998, and committed to CVS
later that
night.
25 years is a long time in the software world, and it makes us happy that so
many people still use Bugzilla to track bug reports and feature requests for
their own products. We hope to continue to breath life into Bugzilla and
continue to modernize it over the years to come!
New Legal Entity to Manage the Bugzilla Project
Back in December I made an enthusiastic
post
about getting Bugzilla back in motion after it kind of stalled for a while. And
then after a month I kind of stopped posting about it. So what happened?
Well, response to that post was actually pretty enthusiastic in itself. I heard
from several people who wanted to donate money to the project to get it going
again. Which then led to a new problem: we didn’t actually have a legal way to
accept donations at the time. So after asking around a bit, and a few
conference calls between myself, my own company’s lawyer, and a couple of
Mozilla’s lawyers, it was decided that Bugzilla needed a legal entity to manage
it, similar to how Thunderbird has been operating recently. And, that’s where
the little bit of time that I’ve had to spend on Bugzilla has gone the last 6
months. And as you can understand, with the legal work going on in the
background, there wasn’t much I could actually talk about until all of the
pieces were actually in place.
Which now brings us to today, when I’m happy to announce the formation of Zarro
Boogs Corporation, which will now be overseeing the Bugzilla Project. This is a
taxable non-profit non-charitable corporation – we have filed with the IRS our
intent to operate under US Tax Code §501(c)(4) (still pending approval from the
IRS) meaning the IRS would require us to spend money raised on project expenses
and not make a profit, but money donated to us will not earn you a tax
deduction because we aren’t a charity (software development is not considered a
charitable cause in the US). Unlike Thunderbird, which is a subsidiary of the
Mozilla Foundation, we are an independent entity not owned by or associated
with the Mozilla Foundation, although they have licensed the use of the
Bugzilla trademark to us.
The name Zarro Boogs Corporation is a shout-out to the phrase returned by
Bugzilla when you run a search which returns no results, “Zarro Boogs found.”
The buggy spelling of “Zero Bugs” being intentional because it’s generally
believed that there’
