The three articles (the open letter, Dries' blog post and Larry's blog post) are unfortunately a little unclear on this unless you read them in their entirety,

The three articles (the open letter, Dries' blog post and Larry's blog post) are unfortunately a little unclear on this unless you read them in their entirety, so it's worth clarifying: though it's discussed a lot, this is not at all about BDSM. This is about Larry's belief in Gorean philosophy (which Larry chooses to conflate with his involvement in BDSM, in my view doing a massive disservice to the elsewise extremely benign BDSM community).