[gecko]

Everything you're asking about happened after I left, so I have no idea. I didn't even know they'd discontinued FogBugz for Your Server.

[Edit: We did discontinue Kiln for Your Server while I was there. We nuked that because the support burden was monstrous, to the point we needed three extra SDETs/sales engineers purely to handle testing and on-prem bug fixes. It threatened Kiln's ability to be profitable. The FogBugz team may've made the same calculus a few years later.]

[mwcampbell]

Do you think there's anything the development team could have done to reduce the support burden, or that a team developing what we now call an on-prem product should do to minimize the support burden today? I know we have tools now that weren't available back then, e.g. containers. And .NET is open source and runs on Linux now, so that might have also helped.

[tedunangst]

Shipping a VM would have simplified things, but nobody did that, and nobody was going to download that. For Linux, we packaged everything we could, but it was still bring your own MySQL, and people had all sorts of terrible configs.

And it was kinda pre-cloud, so usually we got provisioned on some pentium ii forgotten in a closet.