They weren't studying the community, they were studying the patching process used by that community, which a normal IRB would and should consider to be research on a process and therefore not human Research. That's how they presented it to the IRB so it got passed even if what they were claiming was clearly bullshit.
This research had the potential to cause harm to people despite not being human research and was therefore ethically questionable at best. Because they presented the research as not posing potential harm to real people that means they lied to the IRB, which is grounds for dismissal and potential discreditation of all participants (their post-graduate degrees could be revoked by their original school or simply treated as invalid by the educational community at large). Discreditation is unlikely, but loss of tenure for something like this is not out of the question, which would effectively end the professor's career anyway.
At a minimum, is needlessly increasing the workload of an unwitting third party considered a harm? I ask, because I’d be pretty fucking mad if someone came along and added potentially hundreds of man-hours of work in the form of code review to my life.
Considering that the number of patches submitted was quite limited I don't think the original research paper would qualify as a DoS attack. The workload imposed by the original research appears to have been negligible compared to the kernel effort as a whole, no more than any drive by patch submission might result in. So no, I wouldn't personally view that as harmful.
As to the backdated review now being undertaken, as far as I'm concerned that decision is squarely on the maintainers. (Honestly it comes across as an emotional outburst to me.)
Wasting time is nor considered stealing. If it were, there is a long queue to collect money from: all the add agencies, telephone menues where you have to go 10 level deep before you speak to a person, anyone who is bothering people on the street with questions, anyone making your possessions dirty would be a criminal. Anyone going on a date that doesnt work out would be a criminal.
Sure, but I'm still going to be pretty annoyed with you. And if you've wasted my time by messing with a system or process under my control then I'm probably going to block you from that system or process.
As a really prosaic example, I've blocked dozens - if not hundreds - of recruiter email addresses on my work email account.
In my experience in university research, the correct portrayal of the ethical impact is the burden of the researchers unfortunately, and the most plausible explanation in my view given their lack of documentation of the request for IRB exemption would be that they misconstrued the impact of the research.
It seems very possible to me that an IRB wouldn't have accepted their proposed methodology if they hadn't received an exemption.
