Comment by returningfory2
4 years ago
Commenters have been reasonably accusing the researchers of bad practice, but I think there's another possible take here based on Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
If you look at the website of the PhD student involved [1], they seem to be writing mostly legitimate papers about, for example, using static analysis to find bugs. In this kind of research, having a good reputation in the kernel community is probably pretty valuable because it allows you to develop and apply research to the kernel and get some publications/publicity out of that.
But now, by participating in this separate unethical research about OSS process, they've damaged their professional reputation and probably setback their career somewhat. In this interpretation, their other changes were made in good faith, but now have been tainted by the controversial paper.
I suppose it depends on what you make of Greg's opinion (I am only vaguely familiar with this topic, so I have none).
> They obviously were _NOT_ created by a static analysis tool that is of any intelligence, as they all are the result of totally different patterns, and all of which are obviously not even fixing anything at all. So what am I supposed to think here, other than that you and your group are continuing to experiment on the kernel community developers by sending such nonsense patches?
Greg didn't think that the static analysis excuse could be legitimate as the quality was garbage.
I know this is old, but got a link? That LMKL thread is long
That looks like a different person from the name in the article.