Comment by capableweb
4 years ago
In the end, the damage has been done and the Linux developers are now going back and removing all patches from any user with a @umn.edu email.
Not sure how the researchers didn't see how this would backfire, but it's a hopeless misuse of their time. I feel really bad for the developers who now have to spend their time fixing shit that shouldn't even be there, just because someone wanted to write a paper and their peers didn't see any problems either. How broken is academia really?
This, in of itself, is a finding. The researchers will justify their research with "we were banned which is a possible outcome of this kind of research..." I find this disingenuous. When a community of open source contributors is partially built on trust, then violators can and will be banned.
The researchers should have approached the maintainers got get buy in, and setup a methodology where a maintainer would not interfere until a code merge was immanent, and just play referee in the mean time.
I don’t mind them publishing that result, as long as they make it clear that everyone from the university was banned, even people not affiliated with their research group. Of course anyone can get around that ban just by using a private email address (and the prior paper from the same research group started out using random gmail accounts rather than @umn.edu accounts), but making this point will hopefully prevent anyone from trying the same bad ideas.
I feel the same way. People don't understand how it is difficult to be a maintainer. This is very selfish behaviour. Appreciate Greg's strong stance against it.