Happy 20th birthday, Bugzilla!

The open source release of Bugzilla turns 20 years old today!

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.

20 years later, Bugzilla is still alive and kicking, and about to get a major facelift that’s about 10 years overdue. I had really hoped to be announcing the release of Bugzilla 6 with this post, but we’re not quite there yet. Dylan has been making great progress with the recent merges from bugzilla.mozilla.org, though, and I’m hopeful that we’ll have something that people can at least try out in the really near future. Realistically we’re a few months away from having a full release though.

Over the last 20 years we’ve had about 300 contributors to the Bugzilla code. Here’s a few words from the very first one:

I am in complete shock and awe that Bugzilla has lasted this long. 20 years? Hardly any software lasts more than 5. I’m so very proud that it’s still going strong after these years. 20 years ago from tomorrow (on August 27th, 1998) I filed several bugs against Bugzilla, known problems that I thought would want to get fixed. I’m delighted to point out that one of these bugs <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540> is STILL open. After all, you need long-living bugs if you’re going to have a long-living bug system! — Terry Weissman

And that bug is finally about to get fixed. 🙂

Other exciting developments include running as a standalone daemon with Mojolicious and the multitude of user experience enhancements by BugzillaUX in the pipeline make the future look bright!

Here’s to the next 20 years!