Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by staticassertion 1872 days ago
You're pulling all of this out of thin air.

> and that there was some agreement in place with the University which must have stipulated "no more bogus patches"

This is baseless.

> Then Aditya went and posted another bogus patch

Not bogus. Aditya's analyzer did in fact find plenty of bugs - do your research, this is confirmed by many other maintainers.

> to further his career, even though he should have known how that would be received

Why should he have known that? I would never expect to receive the kind of feedback given by Greg, followed by a total university ban, over a student submitting subpar commits. It's an insane overreaction.

2 comments

> Not bogus. Aditya's analyzer did in fact find plenty of bugs

But the commit in question was bogus, and it looks like Aditya did not properly check the output of his tool. Maybe he did not send bogus patches on purpose, but the fact that he used the Linux kernel as a playground for testing his experimental static analysis tool (without disclosing it in the commits) is still problematic and he should be called out for that.

Greg wrote: "we will have to report this, AGAIN, to your university..."

There was behind-the-scenes talk that the student chose to ignore, it's impossible to interpret in any other way.

Here's another interpretation based on the facts we know today:

Greg was assuming these were patches coming from some new "hypocrite patch" project at UMN and "AGAIN" refers to the previous incident in Aug2020 regarding the paper. I don't think the student was ignoring anything. Greg categorically dismissed legitimate contributions to the kernel because of his rash perception that UMN was up to no good AGAIN. So that's why he referenced the previous event and said AGAIN.

In reality, this isn't some conspiracy where UMN was attempting to add hypocrite patches for a 2nd time. Greg was dead wrong in that regard. You need to read: https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/%7Ekjlu/papers/full-disclosure.....

In other words: Greg and all the other kernel maintainers were made unwilling participants in a research project (the "hypocrite patches") and then were made unwilling participants in another research project with the same advisor (the static analyzer which was of questionable utility).

So - no more free research support for the University of Minnesota. That's fair because the reviewers did not choose to spend time on the University of Minnesota's research output.