by Z98 » Tue Aug 07, 2012 5:43 am
Atlassian offers free licenses to open source projects. Several Apache projects for example use Jira. It was selected because one of the problems the project suffers from is the inability to keep track of tasks, ie progress updates and timelines. Bugzilla is very bare bones (or nonexistent) in this respect. Atlassian also offers the ability to plug into existing user management systems much more seamlessly (in theory) than a lot of other solutions. As anyone who has ever tried to work with the current RosCMS can tell you, trying to hack together four different (Bugzilla, phpbb, mediawiki, RosCMS) systems that were never intended to be tied together to use a centralized login is an absolute nightmare. Bugzilla is actually one of the worst culprits in this regard, as it relies on a completely different semantic for users. With Atlassian, we're hoping to get this down to just two, since the CMS we intend to use will have the forum built in and I believe a much nicer way of interfacing with the new wiki software as well. And since Atlassian (and by extension Jira) actually has hooks for plugging into different systems, we do not need to basically reintegrate the glue code every time we upgrade one component (in theory).
Note that those who oppose the move will need to present some actual arguments to back their position. Merely stating the position doesn't really tell us anything.
