I've glanced through their paper and I don't see them accounting for or even mentioning the bias that would exist when you submit patches from a university Vs say, an individual account.
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They didn't submit them that way. You're confusing the good faith patches that are being reverted from the university with the ones submitted from sockpuppet email addresses for the experiment using Gmail.
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Are you sure? This patch doesn't seem to be very "good faith" (though it's possible I'm missing something here?).
lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH5%
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They've been regularly involved in submitting fixes based on static analysis. Not all of those patches are correct. Tools have many false positives and the students make mistakes. Do you have any evidence that this has to do with the study, which seemed to use gmail addresses?
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I based my original reply in this thread, here someone claims that the patch set I linked above (from a uni email) is part of the paper : lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH+z
You're right that they may be innocent patches, I've read a few threads about that since leaving my comment here...
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in this case the patch doesn't line up with the description at all. It's hard to believe it's a good faith patch.
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They're students trying to silence errors from static analysis. It's a reach to claim that it's not in good faith because it's clearly wrong. They aren't experienced Linux kernel or probably even C developers. Many of the fixes they've submitted are still useful and correct.
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Sure, you may well be correct here, however given the circumstances I think a certain level of cynicism is a good thing. You've jumped very quickly to fight this position which I never claimed to hold? My comment is based on 5 minutes of reading, nothing more.
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It's naive to claim that all their patches are in good faith, e.g. this one, but then we get into arguing if it's justified to ban the university, and frankly I don't have a hat in that ring. I don't feel strongly either way.
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So, maybe you shouldn't be making claims about whether someone was acting good faith based on 5 minutes of reading. Those are pretty serious accusations. The university acted unethically but so are certain kernel maintainers, and so are you right here.
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You're accusing a student of maliciously submitting a patch without bothering to spend the time looking into the situation. See the problem?
What happens if someone malicious decides to start doing it instead of researchers with an unethical study not intended to cause harm?
I don't understand a number of your responses in this thread. It seems like you're taking statements as meaning much broader things than they do on a plain reading.
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I'm responding to what people said. The intentionally bad patches were sent from Gmail addresses, so a lot of what people are saying doesn't really apply to what happened.
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