Comment by mort96

4 years ago

No, it's totally okay to feel sorry for good, conscientious researchers and students at the University of Minnesota who have been working on the kernel in good faith. It's sad that the actions of irresponsible researchers and associated review boards affect people who had nothing to do with professor Lu's research.

It's not wrong for the kernel community to decide to blanket ban contributions from the university. It obviously makes sense to ban contributions from institutions which are known to send intentionally buggy commits disguised as fixes. That doesn't mean you can't feel bad for the innocent students and professors.

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mort96

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unanswered  4 years ago

> good, conscientious researchers and students at the University of Minnesota who have been working on the kernel in good faith

All you have to do is look at the reverted patches to see that these are either mythical or at least few and far in between.

  • rjayatilleka  4 years ago

    To be clear, Linux kernel patches from good UMN researchers and students are rare. We have plenty of great people at the University of Minnesota, they just don't work on the Linux kernel.

    It's justifiable and natural for our name to be dragged in the mud here, but as a run of the mill software engineer who graduated from UMN, I hope our reputation isn't soured too much.

    • unanswered  4 years ago

      Sure, I hope it was clear from my original comment I only question whether the UMN contributors to the kernel are acting in good faith. I have identified other questionable patches personally, out of curiosity. Naturally I tend to attribute them to ignorance rather than malice... except, that bad actors intentionally pushing bad patches to an OSS project will inevitably rely on people assuming ignorance rather than malice. This has been well-understood for decades.

  • CRConrad  4 years ago

    Someone in this HN thread found kernel patches (at a guess, not among those now reverted?) from UMN dating back to 2008, -09, and -13 (IIRC). Probably by totally unrelated people.

    So at least definitely not "totally mythical".