I think they could have really helped themselves by being humble and truly apologetic. Simple things like:

- "We are sorry for the harm we caused" instead of "We're sorry for any harm we caused"

- Not trying to explain their actions in the first paragraph of the apology! I think most folks are aware of their intent by now, and leading with yet another explanation just makes the whole thing feel disingenuous

- Avoid saying things like "this has been painful for us as well"

Unfortunately, it has so many hallmarks of a non-apology, and it's hard to look past those given the context.

As others have mentioned, they can clear this up with their actions going forward, but it will take time to rebuild trust.

> hallmarks of a non-apology

Is that a thing? Like there's some non-apology Bingo card you can fill out? I don't see a connection between the criteria you listed and genuine-vs-false contrition.

You may perceive these things one way, but ultimately you can't know the minds of others well enough to tell if they are sincere or not about anything. You don't get to just declare yourself the arbiter of their feelings because they used "any" instead of "the".

There literally are bingo cards, yes!

https://www.google.com/search?q=non+apology+bingo

Thanks, I hate it :]

Does the difficulty of knowing others not put something like this in the court of opinion?

I would expect it to be there and would minimize attempts to marginalize my apology with direct, precise, and inclusive language.

For every word created or omitted to those ends, the number of negative comments will be reduced.

Fact is people take it how they take it and feel what they feel.

There really is no "can't" in any of that.

...which is why the consistent feedback to those ends is here in the discussion.

How else is this to be done and be meaningful, not easily gamed?

Serious question.

I wish I knew.

I tend to have pretty dry affect at certain hours of the day, which has caused considerable frustration for myself and others when I know I'm sincere but they don't. Nor does it make much sense to me for that sort of mind-reading to take place democratically. What do we then gain from it?

At best, you get an apology for a misunderstanding over the previous apology, plus a second draft that the masses might like better. Then you still get that lingering contingent that says "you just did that to placate people! Now we really know you don't mean it!"

The cultural apparatus for "Saving Face" is completely broken on a build failure for missing dependencies.

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.

I don't think it's particularly vengeful. I think it's a pretty natural result of the broken trust.

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.

Or it's not in vengeance, but caution after the researchers have demonstrated that they put their needs above the community's. When the presumption of innocence is lost, it's appropriate to revert the patches until they are known to be good.

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...

counterpoint: The LF Technical Advisory Board is taking a look at the history of UMN's contributions and their associated research projects. At present, it seems the vast majority of patches have been in good faith, but we're continuing to review the work. Several public conversations have already started around our expectations of contributors.

https://lwn.net/Articles/854064/

What the authors did is wrong, so did GKH actions. Let's be honest in calling BS out.

Agree that it could be seen as excessive, but this was not just in response to these commits, but also to the university's failure to act once they were informed of them.

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.

The patches are pulled so they can be reviewed carefully before being re-applied, not as a punishment.

Ah that makes more sense, thanks.

Why would you trust anyone who pulls this kind of stunt? IMO pulling all commits pending review and banning future commits is a reasonable precaution, particularly given this disingenuous apology and the failings of the University oversight board.

Problem is, hardly anyone is spending money on lawyers to defend Free Software. So the cheapest way to defend Free Software is to ban submissions from people who have a record of submitting crap.

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.

The developers likely see a systemic problem, not just this group. That very significantly expands their scope of action.