[room500]

Yes, they could. This is actually addressed in the original email thread:

> But they can't then use that type of "hiding" to get away with claiming it was done for a University research project as that's even more unethical than what they are doing now.

[mort96]

I was also thinking that commits from e-mails ending in ".edu" are probably more likely to be assumed to be good-faith; they are from real students/professors/researchers at real universities using their real identities. There's probably going to be way more scrutiny on a commits from some random gmail address.

[bombcar]

Exactly - the kernel maintainers already "prejudge" submissions and part of that judgement is evaluating the "story" behind why a submission is forthcoming. A submission from Linus, ok, he's employed to work on the kernel, but even that would be suspect if it's an area he never touches or appears to be going around the established maintainer.

And one of the most reasonable "stories" behind a patch is "I'm working at a university and found a bug", probably right behind "I'm working at a company and we found a bug".

Banning U of M won't solve everything, but it is dropping a source of known bad patches.