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Forking the kernel should be sufficient for research.

Not if the research involves the reviewing aspects of open source projects.

Apparently they aren't doing human experiments, it's only processes and such. So they can easily emulate the processes in-house too!

This research is specifically about getting patches accepted into open source projects, so that wouldn't work at all.

For other research happening in the university. This particular research is trivial anyway, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26888417