If you read the rest of the chain til the end, Linus acknowledges that occasionally userspace has to break. He mentions security issues and extremely old code that provides no other option but breaking it, but then suggests that this was not one of them.

> () Yes, there are exceptions. We have had situations where some interface was simply just a huge security issue or had some other fundamental issue. And we've had cases where the breakage was just so old that it was no longer fixable. So even rule #1 can sometimes have things that hold it back. But it is very* rare. Certainly nothing like this.