Comment by tikiman163
4 years ago
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.
> This research had the potential to cause harm to people
I don't buy it, and you fail to back that claim up at all.
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.)
4 replies →
It certainly is considered harm. Ethical research with human subjects makes every effort to do no harm.
Taking someone's time without compensating them can be harmful. That's why researchers often give gift cards or small amounts of money for filling out surveys.
It's not always as straightforward as paying participants, but compensating participants for their time should be a consideration in ethical research with human subjects.
I don't know how much time the kernel maintainers spent on these patches or what their time is worth, but I'm certain that the time they spent on this is worth way more than the nothing they got in return.
The uncompensated time that maintainers spent on this is harm. And that anger that you imagine you would feel is harm. Ethical research with human subjects tries to avoid causing this kind of harm, and there seems to have been no such effort in this research design. This was not ethical research.