I don't disagree with your frustration at all, but there are some actual reasons the problem exists. Some of them are: * A public bug tracker is effectively a

I don't disagree with your frustration at all, but there are some actual reasons the problem exists. Some of them are: * A public bug tracker is effectively a forum that must be policed for spam and other nonsense. * You are assuming too much about internal bug trackers. Some companies really don't have them, and some that do have them, make poor use of them. These aren't necessarily clueless, broken companies, either, some of them work very efficiently with ad-hoc processes that simply don't include anything you'd recognize as a bug tracker. (Obviously these are small companies.) * About "linking" an internal and public bug tracker: Finicky, error prone, administrative time sink. * General administrative overhead even for internal bug trackers can be high. I know one company for which two full-time positions carry job descriptions that amount to "bugzilla admin". They make some of the best use of Bugzilla I've ever seen, but it costs a lot of time and money.