The dark side of empowered users: Bug flood
Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Expertise Processors | Semiconductors | Web browsers | Quantum computing | Supercomputers | AI | 3D printing | Drones | Computer science | Physics | Programming | Materials science | USB | UWB | Android | Digital photography | Science Credentials
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
The open-source community prides itself on the direct feedback developers get from their software's users. But there's an ugly side, too: the bug flood.
When Red Hat released its new Fedora Core 6 on October 24, one day before Canonical released its new "Edgy Eft" Ubuntu, users chimed in with plenty of gripes. One developer, Andre Klapper, illustrated the phenomenon on his blog with a graph of the bugs reported in the Nautilus File Manager.
The number of bugs reported jumped north of 140 per day before dipping down to a more moderate rate of about 50, according to the chart.
According to the GNOME project's bug-tracking system, Klapper is the top-ranked bug closer.