Looking back at the UMN episode

Current US academia, especially in the computer area, is fairly broken, and I say that as someone deeply involved in it.

Researchers are judged on grant money, with a side focus on high-profile publications, and that's about it. The stakes are high and sadly there's a lot of politics and cheating involved that's often overlooked because the majority of people involved are afraid the whole scheme will collapse if it's investigated too thoroughly.

It turns out doing actual proper Linux or open-source research that involves working closely with upstream is hard. In addition, making slow gradual improvements to existing code is considered "incremental" and will not get publications or funding.

Wheras hiring a few low-level students to grab a 10-year old RHEL kernel, fling some poorly-written benchmarks at it, then write up some over-the-top article about "Linux is terrible" seems to be a winning way to get a top publication. Things are peer-reviewed, but understand it's generally other similar minded professors doing the peer-review (or even their grad students if the big name person is "too busy") rather than knowledgeable people from industry/open-source.

The articles will often propose preposterous "solutions" to the problems they find (as per the original UMN work. Similarly, I've been at PhD defences where O(N^3) algorithms were proposed for the scheduler and none of the experts batted an eye).

They don't like fixing bugs either because their tools look less impressive if they can't claim 1000 bugs found anymore because they fixed things upstream.

There really isn't a good solution to this in the current environment. I've suggested in the past that maybe the Linux Foundation could offer grants, sort of like google-summer-of-code, but for longer (3 year?) terms with strict wording requiring proper contributions back. I've been told this is not the kind of thing the foundation is interested in encouraging.