And that fact highlights the mistakes made here.

A fellow researcher intentionally pushing bad data into a colleague's study as some kind of penetration test on the colleague's scientific methodology would be justifiably seen as betrayal, and a possibly bad faith betrayal at that since research grants are a finite resource.

The researchers in the story appear to have failed to extrapolate that sort of collegial courtesy to the open source community maintaining Linux.

The researchers in this story acted unethically - as academics. I'm saying it's not the culture difference.