Comment by liamwire
4 years ago
At a minimum, is needlessly increasing the workload of an unwitting third party considered a harm? I ask, because I’d be pretty fucking mad if someone came along and added potentially hundreds of man-hours of work in the form of code review to my life.
Considering that the number of patches submitted was quite limited I don't think the original research paper would qualify as a DoS attack. The workload imposed by the original research appears to have been negligible compared to the kernel effort as a whole, no more than any drive by patch submission might result in. So no, I wouldn't personally view that as harmful.
As to the backdated review now being undertaken, as far as I'm concerned that decision is squarely on the maintainers. (Honestly it comes across as an emotional outburst to me.)
If you steal only $5 from me, I am still harmed. If you break my computer monitor, then even if I can afford a replacement, I am still harmed.
Wasting time is nor considered stealing. If it were, there is a long queue to collect money from: all the add agencies, telephone menues where you have to go 10 level deep before you speak to a person, anyone who is bothering people on the street with questions, anyone making your possessions dirty would be a criminal. Anyone going on a date that doesnt work out would be a criminal.
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It certainly is considered harm. Ethical research with human subjects makes every effort to do no harm.
Taking someone's time without compensating them can be harmful. That's why researchers often give gift cards or small amounts of money for filling out surveys.
It's not always as straightforward as paying participants, but compensating participants for their time should be a consideration in ethical research with human subjects.
I don't know how much time the kernel maintainers spent on these patches or what their time is worth, but I'm certain that the time they spent on this is worth way more than the nothing they got in return.
The uncompensated time that maintainers spent on this is harm. And that anger that you imagine you would feel is harm. Ethical research with human subjects tries to avoid causing this kind of harm, and there seems to have been no such effort in this research design. This was not ethical research.