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Comment by shawnz | Hacker News Reader

What's the recourse for them though? Just beg to have the decision reversed?

The main thing you want here is a demonstration that they realize they fucked up, realize the magnitude of the fuckup, and have done something reasonable to lower the risk of it happening again, hopefully very low.

Given that the professor appears to be a frequent flyer with this, the kernel folks banning him and the university prohibiting him from using Uni resources for anything kernel related seems reasonable and gets the point across.

Expel the students and fire the professor. That will demonstrate their commitment to high ethical standards.

Or fire the IRB people who approved it, and the professor(s) who should've known better. Expelling students seems a bit unfair IMO.

I agree in this case the driver of the behavior seems to be the professor, but graduate researchers are informed about ethical research and there many ways students alone can cause harm through research potentially beyond the supervision of the university and even professor. It's usually much more neglible than this, but everyone has a responsibility in abiding by ethical norms.

The students do need a bit of punishment - they are adults who chose to act this way. In this context though, switching their advisor and requiring a different research track would be sufficient - that's a lot of work down the drain and a hard lesson. I agree that expulsion would be unfair - (assuming good faith scholarship) the advisor/student relationship is set up so that the students can learn to research effectively (which includes ethically) with guidance from a trusted researcher at a trusted institution. If the professor suggests or OKs a plan, it is reasonable for the students to believe it is a acceptable course of action.

If the student blatantly lied about why and how he made those commits then that’s grounds for expulsion though.

1. What the student code at umn says and what i think the student deserves are vastly different things.

2. Something being grounds for expulsion and what a reasonable response would be are vastly different things.

3. The rules saying "up to and including" (aka grounds for) and the full range of punishment are not the same - the max of a range is not the entirety of the range.

4. So what?

The student doubled down on his unethical behavior by writing that his victim was “making wild accusations that are bordering on slander.”

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

You are mixing up two students. The one who complained about "bordering on slander" had nothing to do with the research paper at issue, other than having the same advisor as the author.

Dunking on individual maintainers for academic bragging rights seems pretty unfair, too.

Expelling the students seem overkill - they have advisors that should be fired for allowing it to happen

The comment about IRB —- institutional research board —- is clear, I think.

The suggestion about the IRB was made by a third party. Look at the follow up comment from kernel developer Leon Romanovsky.

> ... we don't need to do all the above and waste our time to fill some bureaucratic forms with unclear timelines and results. Our solution to ignore all @umn.edu contributions is much more reliable to us who are suffering from these researchers.

To follow up on my comment here, I think Greg KH's later responses were more reasonable.

> ... we have the ability to easily go back and rip the changes out and we can slowly add them back if they are actually something we want to do.

> I will be working with some other kernel developers to determine if any of these reverts were actually valid changes, were actually valid, and if so, will resubmit them properly later. ... future submissions from anyone with a umn.edu address should be by default-rejected unless otherwise determined to actually be a valid fix

Probably that, combined with "we informed the professor of {serious consequences} should this happen again".

Well, yes? Seems like recourse in their case would be to make a convincing plea or plan to rectify the problem that satisfies decision makers in the linux project.

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