Custom fields

[Gervase Markham]

J. Paul Reed wrote:

> One thing we have to think about that he doesn't is the cost and
> probability of forking; it could be that some customer (Zippy, or ZippyII,
> whomever that may be) *wants* custom fields, and are willing to fork the
> project over that.

The only cost here is the possibility of lost development effort. For 
Joel, that's not an issue, because his customers don't do development 
for him. For us, it's usually just failing to gain some extra resource, 
rather than actively losing anything.

People like Dave, who work full time on the Bugzilla trunk, are an 
exception to this. If his employer forks, we do actively lose resource. 
So Dave will almost certainly find himself presented with conflicts 
where it would be easier for him to check in some feature that his 
employer wants (and "better for Bugzilla" because his employer stays on 
the trunk), but probably better for Bugzilla's design and cleanness if 
he doesn't.

I am very pleased that he has begun to address this issue in the latest 
status report.

> Are we willing to allow that to happen over this feature?

It's happened before - Bugzilla used to be in a whole load of pieces (RH 
Bugzilla (Oracle), IssueZilla (the word 'issue'), Fenris...). And if we 
say that we are unwilling to let it happen, we are saying that therefore 
we will definitely include any feature that anyone produces.

> In some ways, Joel has it easier, because he can say "We're not supporting
> that," deal with the loss in sales, but keep the product clean and 
> unified.

Why is Bugzilla less clean and unified if we say "We're not supporting 
that" and someone forks?

Open Source software is about having the power to adapt software to your 
own needs. There is certainly no requirement for any "core distribution" 
of a piece of software to roll in every feature or enhancement that 
someone produces. And we should certainly not try and prevent people 
needing to do personal customisations by incorporating all sorts of 
cruft into the main distribution under the banner of "unity".

> >>I'll even volunteer now to write it up. ;-)
> >
> >Easy, tiger :-)
>
> "Tiger?"
>
> Need I remind you that you're a mere 2 years older than I am?

It's an expression :-) No need to read too much into it.

Gerv