[quickthrowman]

California controls the licenses for smog test stations. I would imagine there’s a clause in the contract that says “California, at any time, may do random undercover inspections of the smog testing facility to ensure compliance” which the owner of the licensed smog station would be aware of.

Do you see how that differs from an academic randomly experimenting on an open source project with no notice or warning?

Retail store owners/managers contract out “mystery shoppers” to test compliance with retail store policy and procedure. This example is also nothing like the UMN experimenting on Linux, since there’s a contract and both parties are aware.

A similar example to the UMN/Linux situation would be an academic doctor deciding to randomly test blood donor screening by sending in HIV positive people to lie about their status in order to donate tainted blood and only telling the Red Cross or whoever after the blood has been donated.