There is a sea of difference between A/B testing your own property, and maliciously introducing a bug on a critical piece of software that's running on billions of devices.
"We did not introduce or intend to introduce any bug or vulnerability in the Linux kernel. All the
bug-introducing patches stayed only in the email exchanges, without being adopted or merged into any
Linux branch, which was explicitly confirmed by maintainers. Therefore, the bug-introducing patches in
the email did not even become a Git commit in any Linux branch. None of the Linux users would be
affected."
That seems to directly contradict gkh and others (including the researchers) in the email exchange in the original post - these vulnerable patches reached stable trees and maintainers had to revert them.
They may not have been included in a release, but should gkh not have intervened *this would have reached users*, especially if the researchers weren't apparently aware their commits were reaching stable.
