January 13, 2026
Kernel drama, campus karma
A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)
Open‑source heartbreak: a college’s stunt meets a fierce ban and a meme storm
TLDR: The Linux community banned the University of Minnesota after a controversial research “experiment” sent trust crashing. Comments split between calling it a useful stress test and blasting it as unethical, with IRB outrage and BSD jokes showing why open-source rules — and its drama — matter.
One email, fifteen days, and a whole university got the boot from the Linux kernel — and the internet grabbed popcorn. The Linux community felt betrayed after University of Minnesota researchers ran a controversial “experiment” that looked like slipping bad code into the core of Linux. A furious maintainer fired back with “You are not welcome here,” and the comment sections went nuclear, especially in a mega‑thread stacked with 3,000+ upvotes.
The hot takes were scorching. One camp defended the stunt as a wake‑up call — if bad patches can sneak through, better to find out now, said supporters like letmetweakit. The other side slammed it as ethics‑dumpster‑fire territory: professors fumed about IRB (the committee that approves human research) and asked how this got a pass, with paultopia calling it a classic “asleep at the wheel” moment. Meanwhile, pragmatists like arjie argued that trust in open source is a numbers game — you weigh reputation and risk, or drown in review costs.
And the jokes? Spicy. Commenters quipped “there’s always BSD” as a rebound OS, riffed on “IRB = I’m Really Banned,” and treated Greg KH’s line like a breakup meme. Even as folks debated if UMN ever got un‑banned, the vibe was clear: open‑source isn’t your lab rat — mess around and find out.
Key Points
- •A UMN student emailed a Linux kernel patch on April 6, 2021.
- •Fifteen days later, UMN was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel.
- •Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux Foundation fellow, announced UMN was not welcome due to experimental behavior.
- •Kangjie Lu joined UMN in 2017 and conducts Linux kernel-focused security research.
- •The Linux kernel has a rigorous, multi-stage patch vetting process involving maintainers, mainline integration, and testing before stable release.