When I started working on Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org) in 2004, it was a difficult time for the whole project. There were tremendous problems with the code, we hadn't gotten a major release out in two years, and a lot of the main developers had left to go do paid work.
But eventually, thanks to a bunch of new members in the Bugzilla community, we released Bugzilla 2.18. Hooray! Bells rang, birds sang, and there was much rejoicing.
However, in the space between Bugzilla 2.16 (which was before my time) and Bugzilla 2.18 (which was the first release that I helped get out), something very strange happened – we developed serious competition.
All of the sudden there were a bunch of new and competing bug-tracking systems, some of them open-source and some of them not, that people were actually using.
At first it wasn't too worrisome. Bugzilla was pretty dominant in its field, and it's hard to lose that kind of position. But as time went on, there was...