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If I dropped by a UMN researcher's office and asked for 30 minutes of their time for something they consider unimportant, they could reasonably reply, "no, I'm
by raegis 5y ago
If I dropped by a UMN researcher's office and asked for 30 minutes of their time for something they consider unimportant, they could reasonably reply, "no, I'm too busy with research". Likewise, a kernel developer should not be forced to unwittingly waste their time. The "malice" here is that the researchers may consider their time more valuable than others. Incompetence is a separate thing.
Lastly, kernel developers are naturally going to trust computer scientists at major universities. The researchers know this (subconsciously or not) and took advantage of it. Patches from smith@joeschmoe.com will automatically get more scrutiny.
- cycomanic 5y agoBut that is not what happened. In the bug submission experiment they used Gmail addresses not their UMN addresses. The whole thing came up when one of the students (I think he was a graduate student working in the research group) submitted patches from his over eager static analysis tool using his uni address. So if anything the work from the uni adress received more scrutiny than the other patches.
- raegis 5y agoOK, agreed, I was wrong on my second point.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seoaeu 5y agoIf the original headline had been "graduate student submits auto-generated patches wasting several hours of kernel developer time," I sincerely doubt there would have been any outrage. Certainly no one would be calling it proportionate to ban the many tens of thousands of people at their university and to revert every patch they had ever submitted. Unfortunately for the graduate student, their lab had previously written a paper about sending buggy patches. One thing leads to another and we have "the UMN Affair"