Ubuntu: More Bugs Than Mozilla, OpenOffice, KDE Combined

receives many more reports of software bugs

The numbers he presents, though, are interesting:

"In the month of April 2008, I found the following bug counts for large FLOSS projects:

Upstreams (bug reports):

Mozilla 5,334

OpenOffice 1,076

Gnome 5,364

KDE 1,335

Total: 13,109

Distributions:

Ubuntu 13,064

Debian 5,103

"With hindsight, April was possibly a bad choice, because it was an Ubuntu release month so there's usually a small spike in the number of bugs filed. It would be interesting to see the stats for other distributions, and projects, over a full year. But the general picture is clear - within our family of distributions, Ubuntu carries the brunt of the load w.r.t. bug tracking, triage and patch management - not only for our users, but for a broad cross-section of the open source stack."

Shuttleworth's big request: A single, cross-distribution tool that can track bug reports and bug fixes across the board, and across the stack, so that the work of improving open source software becomes more efficient.