Comment by tinco
4 years ago
The goal is not penalizing or lumping everyone together. The goal is to have the issue fixed in the most effective manner. It's not the Linux team's responsibility to allow contributions from some specific university, it's the university's. This measure enforces that responsibility. If they want access, they should rectify.
I would then say that the goal and the choice aren't aligned because "penalizing or lumping everyone together" is exactly the choice made.
They would presumably reconsider blanket ban, if the university says they will prohibit these specific researchers from committing to Linux.
If a company that sold static analysis products did this as part of a marketing campaign, would you likewise have so many reservations about blacklisting contributions from that company, or would you still be insisting on picking out individual employees?
It's pretty obvious what would happen if a firm tried this: they'd be taken to court and probably imprisoned, as this is a clear violation of the law (which is pretty broadly to capture any attempted interference with the correct operation of a computer program).
the university can easily resolve the issue by firing the professors
do you know that would resolve the issue? this just seems like idle, retributive speculation.
The University can presumably not in fact do this.
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The people who are effected by the rule or discouraged by it cannot do so.
The university's IRB approved the research for the first paper as exempt. There is organization-level culpability here. It is reasonable for Linux kernel maintainers to block an organization acting in bad faith.