alt Hacker NewsThe authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community against them.
Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.
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I mean...there is a whole discussion about the questionable ethics of the research methods in the verge article. And human subjects and issues-of-consent questions aside, they are also messing with a mission critical system (linux kernel), and apparently left crappy code in there for all the maintainers to go back and weed out.
> Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.
The blanket ban was kicked off by another incident after the hypocrite commit incident.