I feel like this has been a problem with kernel maintainers for a while. They take moderation action to preserve face, or for political reasons. I'm specifically thinking of the UMN thing, which everyone seems to have forgotten about.
Briefly, researchers at University of Minnesota submitted patches with security vulnerabilities, got them accepted, and then retracted them before they were pushed into mainline. They then published a paper talking about how the process for Linux maintainers vetting contributions needs to be overhauled. I believe the researchers said that every single one of the vulnerabilities could be found with a static analyzer.
This makes kernel maintainers look very very bad. So, in response, they declared the entire University of Minnesota a bad-faith actor. They banned all @umn.edu addresses from contributing. They reverted/reviewed every single commit made by an @umn.edu address (these despite the fact that all of the hypocrite commits were submitted through gmail), and issued pissy statements about how this was dangerous to the ecosystem. GKH's crybaby fit can be read
here (
a).
They politicked up concern over the ethics of the study. They got the university's IRB involved, saying that a study involving human participants should have had approval from an ethics committee, despite the fact that all they did was email some people some text and note how they responded to that text. Despite the fact that pen-testing and red-teaming are routinely done in the private sector, and you could honestly consider this to be a public service.
The pattern of kernel maintainers being cowards, lying, obfuscating, drumming up passions of retards who don't know what they're talking about, etc, is long established.
