[querez]

Depends on your notion of "properly". IMO "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" is not an acceptable way to experiment on people. The "proper" way to do this would've been to request permission from the higher echelons of Linux devs beforehand, instead of blindly wasting the time of everyone involved just so you can write a research paper.

[andrewflnr]

That's still not asking permission from the actual humans you're experimenting on, i.e. the non-"higher echelons" humans who actually review the patch.