[Xorlev]

That's a witch hunt, and is not productive. A bad apple does not spoil the bunch, as it were. It does reflect badly on their graduate program to have retained an advisor with such poor judgement, but that isn't the fault of thousands of other excellent graduates.

[nousermane]

It's discomforting to see "bad apple" metaphor being used to say "isolated instance with no influence to its surroundings".

That is exact opposite of how rot in literal bunch of apples behave. Spoil spreads throughout the whole lot very, very quickly.

[bobthepanda]

Also the common phrase is “a bad apple spoils the bunch.”

[btilly]

Both variations are common. "It was just a few bad apples" is the one you more often see today. But it only became common after refrigeration made it so that few people now experience what is required to successfully pack apples for the winter.

[blippage]

Undoubtedly I am in the minority here, but I think it's less a question of ethics, and more a question of bad judgement. You just don't submit vulnerabilities into the kernel and then say "hey, I just deliberately submitted a security vulnerability".

The chief problem here is not that it bruises the egos of the Linux developers for being psyched, but that it was a dick move whereby people now have to spend time sorting this shit out.

Prof Liu miscalculated. The Linux developers are not some randos off the street where you can pay them a few bucks for a day in the lab, and then they go away and get on with whatever they were doing beforehand. It's a whole community. And he just pissed them off.

It is right that Linux developers impose a social sanction on the perpetrators.

It has quite possibly ruined the student's chances of ever getting a PhD, and earned Liu a rocket up the arse.

[dwheeler]

> it's less a question of ethics, and more a question of bad judgement.

I disagree. I think it's easier to excuse bad judgment, in part because we all sometimes make mistakes in complicated situations.

But this is an example of experimenting on humans without their consent. Greg KH specifically noted that the developers did not appreciate being experimented on. That is a huge chasm of a line to cross. You are generally required to get consent before experimenting on humans, and that did not happen. That's not just bad judgment. The whole point of the IRB system is to prevent stuff like that.

[drdeca]

Ah, so people do actually use the expression backwards like that. I had seen many people complain about other people saying “just a few bad apples”, but I couldn’t remember actually seeing anyone use the “one/few bad apple(s)” phrase as saying that it doesn’t cause or indicate a larger problem.

[darkarmani]

> A bad apple does not spoil the bunch, as it were.

What? That's exactly how it works. A bad apple gives off a lot of ethylene which ripens (spoils) the whole bunch.

[xdavidliu]

Ethylene comes from good apples too and is not a bad thing. The thing that bad apples have that spoils bunches is mold.