Warning: rant ahead.

I hate bugzilla. With a vengeance. Not because it doesn't have features or anything; because you need to log on to it to be able to use it. I've got way too many passwords as it is already that I need to remember. I don't want one to be able to file a bug, thank you very much! And no, I'm not going to give you one of my precious other passwords -- especially not one that I use to log on to my system. So that means I'll have to do ugly things to remember it.

grumble.

Why is it that everyone and their mother uses this fsck'ing I-love-passwords-bugzilla? There are only two Open Source projects that I know of who don't: Debian and FreeBSD. The former uses a home-grown BTS which predates bugzilla by several years; the latter uses Gnats which, ironically (since so many FreeBSD developers have philosophical problems with the GPL), is GNU software. It's no accident that I'm associated with one of them.

One advantage of Free Software is that there's so many choice, and that you can use loads of different software—and this happens all the time, everywhere; consider Graphical User Interfaces (KDE, Gnome, ion, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, ...), shells (bash, dash, zsh, tcsh, ...), kernels (FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, ...) etcetera. So why doesn't this happen for bug tracking systems?