Return to Bugopolis Home Page

Bugopolis Offers Antidote to Pure Pain

By Maureen O'Gara of LinuxGram

A Seattle start-up quaintly called Bugopolis Server Appliances is trying to commercialize both the popular open source defect tracking system known as Bugzilla and the recent fork of Source-Forge.net dubbed GForge.

It’s boxing up the software, both of which are supposed to be sheer horrors to install, in twin server appliances and selling them for a flat $2,200 a pop. The boxes should support about 200 seats but there’s no per-seat licensing involved.

Bugopolis is really selling ROI, reportedly one of the few things CIOs and CTOs are buying these days. On average it might take an engineer two weeks to wrestle Bugzilla into working shape. Bugopolis co-founder Jim Walters says he’s heard tell of one place that spent a month on the project and it still didn’t work. GForge is a bit easier, but not much apparently. Linux is not Windows and requires experience.

Bugopolis is offering a turnkey remedy, updates included.

On the Bugzilla front, Bugopolis is competing with such as Rational Software, a pricey proposition. GForge would compete with CollabNet and SourceForge, which VA Software made proprietary and pricey after it hit the wall running as a box shifter and its dreams of being the Linux version of Dell or Compaq crumbled.

Back when it still had a dream, VA set up SourceForge.net as a public service for open source development. It became the place that played host to a reported 50,000 open source development projects in varying stages of activity. VA maintained the underlying code internally and developed it through the so-called Alexandria Project. The Alexandria Project was theoretically open source, but it released its last stable software in November of 2001.

Late last year, Tim Perdue, one of the founding architects behind SourceForge.net, branched the languid Alexandria code and resumed development under the GForge banner.

Bugopolis, which is currently entertaining a term sheet from angel investor Peter Gregory, who cashed out of BSquare, is offering Bugzilla and GForge in 1GHz Pentium-based white boxes from an outfit called Shuttle. Walters says early feedback suggests that potential customers want branded hardware from a company, say, like HP, and a rack-mounted 1U or 2U form factor. Bugopolis is working on it.

The Bugopolis solutions, known as BugStations in their Bugzilla personae and ProjectStations in their GForge avatars, are based on Red Hat 7.3 and the Walters says the software has been hardened to protect against invasions. The appliances can go outside the firewall to make them available to third parties, he said.

Gregory hinted that Bugopolis has other projects on the drawing board past GForge and Bugzilla.

 

Email: sales@bugopolis.com

Call: 360-456-5817

BUGOPOLIS, LLC
1101 Seneca Street, Suite 1403
Seattle, WA 98101
U.S.A.

FAX: 206-621-1879