The variation is not quite large enough to make any serious judgements about the impact of Ubuntu, but the spike in 2004 has a certain whiff of intrigue about it. Perhaps that’s just me.

Of course, I soon wondered what GNOME’s yearly bug submission count looked like. Based on a very simple query against the creation date of all bugs in the database, we get…

2008 … 1554
2007 … 115178
2006 … 66011
2005 … 37838
2004 … 39927
2003 … 36432
2002 … 44130
2001 … 33426
2000 … 12362

Keeping in mind that it’s usually fairly quiet at the beginning of the year, the progress so far in 2008 puts us closer to the 2006 total than 2007′s mammoth results… I wonder if there’s a systemic reason for the massive spike? Perhaps one of the bugsquad folks can provide some insight in the comments.

Meanwhile, something (buggy?) must in the water, because almost as soon as I mentioned the numbers, someone on IRC pointed out Andre Klapper’s timely and informative annual Bugzilla statistics post, based on the output of Olav Vitter’s analysis scripts.

Rock on!