Comment by Avamander
4 years ago
> 1) Contact a single maintainer and explore feasibility of the study
That has the risk that the contacted maintainer is later accused of collaborating with saboteurs or that they consult others. Either very awful or possibly invalidates results.
> 2) Create a group of maintainers who know the experiment is going to happen, but leave a certain portion of the org out of it
Assuming the leadership agrees and won't break confidentiality, which they might if the results could make them look bad. Results would be untrustworthy or potentially increase complacency.
> 4) Interfere before any further damage is done
That was done, was it not?
> Besides, are you arguing that ends justify the means if the intent behind the research is valid?
Linux users are lucky they got off this easy.
> That was done, was it not?
The allegation being made on the mailing list is that some incorrect patches of theirs made it into git and even the stable trees. As there is not presently an enumeration of them, or which ones are alleged to be incorrect, I cannot state whether this is true.
But that's the claim.
edit: And looking at [1], they have a bunch of relatively tiny patches to a lot of subsystems, so depending on how narrowly gregkh means "rip it all out", this may be a big diff.
edit 2: On rereading [2], I may have been incorrectly conflating the assertion about "patches containing deliberate bugs" with "patches that have been committed". Though if they're ripping everything out anyway, it appears they aren't drawing a distinction either...
[1] - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...
[2] - https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2F8jcoC1ffuksrf@kroah.c...
Too late for the edit deadline, but [1] is a claim of an example patch that made it to stable with a deliberate bug.
[1] - https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YIAta3cRl8mk%2FRkH@unreal/