while this is undoubtedly true for hobbiest researchers, there are
pretty good relationships between vendors and some research facilities
with a strong interst in ensuring there is external review of the
code base(es).
(I am personally aware of at least five such facilities...:)
hence I am going to have to echo Randys sentiments. This was just
sloppy.
I am really surprised by these attitudes. Guys (and gals), these
incidents simply go to reinforce that the software we depend on, has not
received sufficient testing and that we all have gigantic exposures due
to things outside of our direct control (eg: cisco, juniper or other
router software quality control). You can't just demand that people
don't do things that wind up being destructive to you on your production
network, thats asking the world to be responsible for you. There are
lots of bugs in this stuff and the sooner that we find out about them,
the sooner we can get updates to address them and hopefully, shorten the
window in which those issues could be painful to us and cause us grief.