And what of the merits? If the previous 190 patches were indeed legitimate it strikes me as overly vengeful to pull them in a "punish the son for the sins of the father and the father for the sins of the son" kind of way.
Yeah, the authors are claiming those past 190 patches are fine... but they also essentially did the same thing when they submitted the intentionally bad patches too.
So the question is, how much do you trust them right now? And given they just submitted intentionally bad patches, I don't think it's very surprising they don't have a whole lot of trust.
And if you don't trust them, then you've got 190 patches active from an untrusted source with a history of submitting bad patches. That's not a particularly good situation. Why wouldn't you revert them?
The specifics of the situation make the whole thing substantially murkier, in my (entirely unrelated) opinion. But take a broad enough view, and this is pretty much the default path. However the specifics make this a bit of an oddly exceptional situation, all things considered.
ETA: GKH on reverting the patches[1]
> This patchset has the "easy" reverts, there are 68 remaining ones that need to be manually reviewed. Some of them are not able to be reverted as they already have been reverted, or fixed up with follow-on patches as they were determined to be invalid. Proof that these submissions were almost universally wrong.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210421130105.1226686-1-gregkh...
https://lwn.net/Articles/854064/
What the authors did is wrong, so did GKH actions. Let's be honest in calling BS out.
They university, and indeed, the researchers, only acted once the ban was imposed - i.e. they were getting away with it without reputational damage, and only once it was stained did they actually do anything.
Blocking an entire University seems extreme; but just think of it as a sanction on the University's ethics board. I think a (short, and very explicit) apology from the ethics board ought to suffice, to get the Uni off the hook.
And I think those researchers should not be allowed near Free Software again, unless their pushes are going to be rigourously scrutinised.