We want parents to make decisions about these things as much as possible. I don't have an issue with my kids getting details on human anatomy, as long as it's not pornography. But everybody is different.
You're assuming the "legacy" system is being replaced by a new one, which isn't the scenario being described in the link or the book. They cover approaches for continuing to safely evolve the legacy (i.e. untested) system.
Rewriting the legacy system is one of the valid paths to maintain it. There can be multiple reasons to do that like operational risk which cannot be mitigated, maintenance overhead, risk related to the existing dependencies of the system.
> Mitchell Baker did not leave the gravy train by stepping down as CEO, she merely moved to a different seat on the gravy train - chair of the Mozilla Foundation
Mitchell has not been a member of the Mozilla Foundation or Mozilla Corporation boards since February 2025.
Bugzilla is a Mozilla product so you’d hope they’d use it themselves (it’s often referred to as “dogfooding”). But Jira is everywhere so I’m sure some project managers argued that it was needed.
And once you have Jira then the same people push for Confluence too. But MediaWiki was the de facto standard before everyone jumped on proprietary solutions like Confluence and Notion. In fact I seem to recall that very early versions of Confluence was just a 3rd party Wiki that Atlassian bought. Or at least there was a Java-based Wiki in their early portfolio.
You also have to bear in mind that organising docs is an endless and thankless job which nobody wants to do. So these things tend to multiply like vermin once someone starts creating docs on another platform. One startup I worked for somehow managed to have stuff scattered between Confluence, Notion and Google Docs despite only employing 50 people. It was crazy.
Another client I recently worked for had Sharepoint, Notion and Confluence as their official tools for documentation.
As for IRC and Slack, every company I’ve worked at in the last 5 years had two of either MS Teams, Zoom or Slack. Literally every company. And that’s in addition to email. Go back further and there was Skype, WebEx, and so on and so forth too.
It’s almost a meme these days to hear the sentence “how would you prefer to be contacted” because so many solutions are competing against each other with overlapping functionality.
Then you have developer-focused tools like GitHub with their own docs and issue tracking too
At this point in time, it’s easier to just accept that each org is going to end up with multiple overlapping solutions because you’ll get new people join the team and they’ll want to use their preferred tool because that’s what they’re productive in and so the spiral continues.
So if Mozilla managed to keep the options down to just 2 for each product category, then I’d say they were doing better than most other organisations.
Bugzilla isn't so much a Mozilla product as something that was home grown at Netscape because there wasn't much else at the time, and they just kept using due to inertia. Though as a developer I'd still prefer that over Jira, but that's probably because I don't really need any reporting functionality.
I've used (and customized) Bugzilla, used Google Buganizer extensively, used Jira for a year and a half, and also built an internal system consisting of a bugtracker + requirements manager + sprint planner + customer management system + manual test tracking tool + knowledge base.
Bugzilla was fine to hack a few extra fields into, but I wouldn't want to build anything around it. Buganizer was actually pretty nice, but suffered from too many competing tools built around it, most of which were just somebody's 20% project, so they kept getting abandoned. Jira wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so slow and annoying to use; only our TPM can keep track of how everything is set up.
The internal system I built was very specialized to our use-cases; it started out as a simple task list and eventually grew into a huge beast. By far the worst part of the system was the manual-test-management system, but that was just a mess due to its very nature. We were able to be very efficient with some of the custom functionality we made.
The problem with that is all nodes stop-start is not a partition!
A partition is when some nodes can’t reach other nodes.
Zookeeper instead has an issue where it does try to restart but the timeout (why?!) is too short, something like 30 seconds. If the majority of your nodes don’t all start within a certain time window the whole cluster stays down until someone manually intervenes.
I discovered this fun feature when keeping non-prod systems off to save money in the cloud.
It also has an impact when making certain big bang changes in production.
Getting into SDRs and ham radio is what brought me back to Windows after running Linux on all my personal computers for more then a decade. For whatever reasons, there's a lot of radio-related software that targets Windows primarily or exclusively.
