Minutes of our last Bugzilla meeting (August 8, 2006)

[Gervase Markham]

Frédéric Buclin wrote:
> * Oracle informed us that they were still interested in having Bugzilla
> 3.0 working with an Oracle DB. They plan to assign two Oracle developers
> on it.
> 
> * Supporting Oracle means we need an Oracle installation on landfill
> (for reviews and testing patches). But we need some Oracle patches to
> install it on RHEL 4, and these patches are not free. justdave will have
> a look if it's possible to get them anyway.

So I guess the question this raises is: are the Bugzilla developers as a
group free software people or open source people? That is to say, do we
do Bugzilla as Free/Open Source because we believe that's the way
software should be ("free software"), or because pragmatically it's what
works ("open source")?

If we are free software people, why exactly are we helping a proprietary
database vendor sell more copies of its product? After all, they won't
even make their OS patches free software, thereby asking us to use
non-free software to help them.

Even if we are "open source" pragmatists, I don't think anyone's ever
argued that Bugzilla _needs_ Oracle. The biggest Bugzilla in the world
runs pretty well on MySQL, and I know some people who think PostgreSQL
is even better. ;-)

Another pragmatic point: in the past, features which have been
implemented but which none of the development team use have turned out
to be maintenance albatrosses. Say Oracle get Bugzilla 3.0 working with
their database, then the developers get reassigned. Then a few Bugzilla
users start using the Oracle support. Who's responsible for keeping it
working?

We got PostgreSQL support because core developers wanted to use
Postgres. Are there any who want to use Oracle? (And why?)

Gerv