Personal Open Source success story

[Bob Tanner <tanner@real-time.com>]

I wanted to share this with all the LUG members.

I am working with Apache's tomcat and I ran into a pretty serious bug dealing
with authentication. It was a show stopper. The bug allowed only Netscape 4.x
to authentication properly and pass through to the application.

Bad news, when the client is mix of Netscape and IE.

Spent most of the day tracking down the class, method and finally the few
lines of code causing the problem. Throw in some debugging and everything
seemed right.

I posted to the development list, detailing all I did for testing, my setup
and where I narrowed the bug to. 12 minutes later (yes, I was clock watching),
I got a response from Spain telling the fix was on its way. Right after the
message I got notification email from the CVS server.

Updated my working tree, recompiled and coolness. Works like a charm.

Try to get that from a commercial company at 4:12am for free (ok, 12 hours of
my time, but I would have probably would have done something similar with a
closed-source product).

This is my Open Source success story.

-- 
Bob Tanner <tanner@real-time.com>       | Phone : (952)943-8700
http://www.mn-linux.org                 | Fax   : (952)943-8500
Key fingerprint =  6C E9 51 4F D5 3E 4C 66 62 A9 10 E5 35 85 39 D9