Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN net] lwn.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lwn.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How a university got itself banned from the Linux kernel
The University of Minnesota’s path to banishment was long, turbulent, and full of emotion
On the evening of April 6th, a student emailed a patch to a list of developers. Fifteen days later, the University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel.
“I suggest you find a different community to do experiments on,” wrote Linux Foundation fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman in a livid email. “You are not welcome here.”
How did one email lead to a university-wide ban? I’ve spent the past week digging into this world the players, the jargon, the university’s turbulent history with open-source software, the devoted and principled Linux kernel community. None of the University of Minnesota researchers would talk to me for this story. But among the other major characters the Linux developers there was no such hesitancy. This was a community eager to speak; it was a community betrayed.
iTWire - Torvalds says submitting known buggy kernel patches is a breach of trust itwire.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from itwire.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
iTWire Wednesday, 28 April 2021 07:21 Submitting known buggy Linux patches ethical, noble and brave Featured Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
A developer known as Giacomo Tesio has backed the actions of students and staff from the University of Minnesota, who sent known buggy patches to the stable Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, writing that the act was not just ethical, but noble and brave . All the livor and drama that followed your research proves that the Linux Foundation failed to learn the lessons of
a post to the kernel mailing list.
He was referring to a 2014 vulnerability in OpenSSL, a cryptographic library that enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption. The flaw would have allowed attackers to monitor all information that flows between a user and a Web service, and could even decrypt past traffic collected. The bug was discovered by three researchers from security firm Coden