Well yes, and as a developer I am very sympathetic to the "author's right" argument. But we must also allow that the netfilter people have the right to decide

Well yes, and as a developer I am very sympathetic to the "author's right" argument. But we must also allow that the netfilter people have the right to decide who is and who isn't one of their core developers, and publish their philosophical positions on their own mailing lists. So I am not sure how the "author's right" angle would assist us other than to say that everybody can, and in this case did, exercise their rights. Perhaps a sounder analysis could begin on the basis that ideally, people would work together, and in order to work together, they must at least be able to talk to each other. It seems unfortunate to me that this person didn't engage in the dialogue that these people apparently sought, even to say that he objected to their position. Then again, it is possible that this developer saw no upside in revealing his position before a potentially hostile audience, and perhaps removing him from the project in some way served as validation of that concern. I do think one of the things we are losing as a society is the ability to tolerate different points of view. I think that might be the real story here. In a simpler time there was merely a battle between free and proprietary software, but we seem to have decided that is not a sufficient set of tribes in which to divide ourselves. We must have copyleft vs permissive, and the copylefters must split into the watered-down LGPLists vs the full strength GPLists (vs the espresso-grade AGPLists). We must have a battle between the One True GPL2 vs the Revised Third Edition. And now apparently we need to sign Enforcement Principles to fix all the things we forgot in the licenses themselves. I guess I understand the motivation to continue to do this, but when our differences are so large as to prevent people from even engaging each other constructively I find that unfortunate.