It wasn't. He gave conclusive reply which established that it's ethical (just telneting and help). Unless you believe samba and everything else is unethical and you club every reverse engineering under one umbrella, your comment is wrong. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tri...

I don't think it's fair to call people douches because they are committed to their moral principals. Especially so here, where the benefit to humanity over the alternative is so clearly obvious.

It is when they attempt to force their moral code on others.

Is the benefit clearly obvious? If you actually adhere 100% to Stallman's code I'm not so sure.

Tridge made no attempt to force his code on others.

In fact, it was the reverse - he felt like he was being locked out of kernel development because he didn't want to align his moral code with those who used BK.

So, he tried to find a way to hold true to his code without forcing the rest of the kernel team to give up BK.

> a Stallman-like free software ideology

You say that like it's a bad thing.

As I remember it, he did

telnet bk-server 5000

and typed "help".

https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/

That's the "how" not the "why".

So having a genuine need to be able to actually use tools that you wrote rather than something a company 'licenses' to you so that can modify, and share these tools is being a douche? Odd that you would think that companies that treat their users like untrustworthy hackers are not douches but those users are!

Here's an article about that: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tri...