Re:
“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose” The professor gets exactly what they want here, no?
"We experimented on the linux kernel team to see what would happen. Our non-double-blind test of 1 FOSS maintenance group has produced the following result: We get banned and our entire university gets dragged through the muck 100% of the time".
That'll be a fun paper to write, no doubt.
Additional context:
* One of the committers of these faulty patches, Aditya Pakki, writes a reply taking offense at the 'slander' and indicating that the commit was in good faith[1].
Greg KH then immediately calls bullshit on this, and then proceeds to ban the entire university from making commits [2].
The thread then gets down to business and starts coordinating revert patches for everything committed by University of Minnesota email addresses.
As was noted, this obviously has a bunch of collateral damage, but such drastic measures seem like a balanced response, considering that this university decided to _experiment_ on the kernel team and then lie about it when confronted (presumably, that lie is simply continuing their experiment of 'what would someone intentionally trying to add malicious code to the kernel do')?
* Abhi Shelat also chimes in with links to UMN's Institutional Review Board along with documentation on the UMN policies for ethical review. [3]
[1]: Message has since been deleted, so I'm going by the content of it as quoted in Greg KH's followup, see footnote 2
[2]:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2FfM%2FTsbmcZzwnX@kroah.com/[3]:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/3B9A54F7-6A61-4A34-9EAC-95332709BAE7@northeastern.edu/#t rzwitserloot,
1 hour ago