On a Monday morning, I add a grumpy old man comment to a Launchpad bug

[kubicle]

Common practice in any organization. An employee identifies a problem, and already knows how to fix it, but first that employee reports the problem, often exaggerating the importance of it, then after a suitable delay suddenly "discovers" a solution so that the employee gets credit for fixing a problem. Some employees will even go so far as to cause the problem in the first place. Cases have occurred of firefighters starting a fire so that they can get recognition for putting it out.

While I concur that this is a fairly common pattern, the analogy doesn't seem fully complete to me...after all, these "fixes" aren't really solving any actual problems (at least not by any conventional logic).

Oh great the GNU camp is here. Honestly, who cares what they call themselves.

Isn't that streching it a bit ...Never met a GNU camper who would be OK with just "Linux".

(Those discussions usually go something like this:
GNUster: "You should call it GNU/Linux."
Me: "I'm not convinced, but a few new names to call you from now on just popped in my head.")
...
Yeah, I know, that's a new thread again :P

[SteveRiley]

these are the "bogus" bug reports Canonical pulls of every cycle, when they have already decided to "fix" them.

Wait. What? My opinion of this company just dwindled yet again.

[SteveRiley]

An employee identifies a problem, and already knows how to fix it, but first that employee reports the problem, often exaggerating the importance of it, then after a suitable delay suddenly "discovers" a solution so that the employee gets credit for fixing a problem. Some employees will even go so far as to cause the problem in the first place.

Separating dev and test, like Microsoft and Amazon do, makes this crap reasonably more difficult, and also disincentivizes it to a degree.