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.