Comment by 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.
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.
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.
Didn't they just blanket revert all patches from University of Minnesota?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26889550
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".