I do wonder if they would have published if they didn't expect disclosure by angry Linux maintainers, i.e. if they really believe they were weakly successful. Generally, I think this is the type of finding that normally gets lost if there's no pre-disclosure.
True as far as it goes, but the most valuable failing research is that which fails to produce an expected positive result.
Next most valuable is failing to corroborate a novel hypothesis (which is probably what you meant).
When you get an expected result, you haven't learned much, regardless of whether you were (or should have been) expecting success OR failure (with the exception being getting more, or more accurate, data that narrows error bars).