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Ubuntu: More Bugs Than Mozilla, OpenOffice, KDE Combined

By Edward F. Moltzen, CRN June 27, 2008
Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu distribution organization Canonical, writes that his flavor of Linux receives many more reports of software bugs than other open source efforts - - for a variety of reasons, not all because the Ubuntu community's work is faulty.

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.


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