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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

Hi all!

In:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000026.html

Joel talks about how the licence for FogBUGZ originally said that one is not allowed to modify the source, and that some of his customers contacted him about getting a source licence, and he decided to remove that clause and allow his customers to modify the source, and send their modifications to Fog Creek, so they can fix bugs, possibly improve it, and generally have more faith that it won't break on them. (This is just a summary, you should read the entire article).

In any case, a few years ago a compiler from FogBUGZ 's VBScript source to PHP was created, and eventually this compiler was enhanced to use a superset of VBScript (called Wasabi) and to have ASP Classic's VBScript, PHP and, more recently, ASP.NET. As a result, I don't expect that the sources that people get when they buy FogBUGZ are easily capable of being modified, because the original language has many features not present in some of the target ones.

Recently, I've been talking with an old friend, whose company is using FogBUGZ and he was instructed to modify it to change one of its design policies, which they needed to change, and from what I've understood, they couldn't change it in the Wasabi sources because they didn't have them. And naturally, changes to the target source codes cannot be directly re-used by Fog Creek for integration into FogBUGZ.

So I think the fair thing to do, in regards to what Joel said in the article, is that Fog Creek should give its customers the original source code of  FogBUGZ along with the compiler, possibly along with some legal restrictions about how that compiler can be used.

So the questions for the FogBUGZ people are: are you currently giving it? And, if not, do you intend to?

Sincerely yours,

-- Shlomi Fish

FogBugz 7 comes with the wasabi source and compiler so you can make changes and build it yourself if you're that way inclined. Although you can do pretty much anything you'd ever want to do to FogBugz via plugins anyway so recompiling shouldn't be necessary in 99.9% of cases.

@Jonh Conners: thanks for the clarification. I'm glad that's the case for FogBUGZ.