Doesn’t this seem a bit hypocritical of you? You can see where a bit of antipathy is useful in one case but not in this other one with Tridgell?

No. Tridgell is just some dude who's been writing code to the benefit of everyone for 30 years. A literal ally, hailing back from more idealistic times, and a part of the movement that gave us the language and means to fight technological hegemony in all its forms. Tech CEOs can eat my shit all they do is build closed gardens and use lawfare to protect them.

The point of talking, “harassing” as you say, to Andrew Tridgell about this directly is that I don’t want him to be excommunicated

Making non-technical github issues to insult a maintainer and demand they take certain actions is not talking. Circulating links to those issues on /c/fuck_ai so people pile up with demeaning walls of text and hundreds of emoji reactions is harassing. There are more people parading their contempt for him in those threads, than the total number of people who contributed tickets or code to the project in 30 years. I can't stop thinking about that, it's so fucking cruel. No help, no thank you, just contempt the minute you displease your masters.

Minimizing the harm done is exactly what bullies do. "I didn't do it but if i did it then it wasn't that bad" yeah i know the lyrics too.

I don’t want rsync to be thrown in with the wolves.

No you just want rsync to remain available to you free of charge, while being maintained in a way that perfectly suits your ideals, without it costing you a dollar or even a minute of effort.

Why does he need this speed, exactly?

Because you're not helping him. Because he's been calling for help which isn't coming, and he's starting to burnout but the software he created is now load bearing and the responsibility is enormous. Also because LLMs are getting semi-good at finding vulnerabilities so anybody with 500$ of tokens can find critical bugs in virtually any software, which they have, which is why this release that is being shat on closes 6 CVEs that may otherwise have taken months to address.

And now instead of pitching in with repro tickets and code to help fix the issues introduced by this version, people are calling to spite-fork the whole thing and revert it to a pre-slop commit. As if the community which didn't help when the project was "pure" would now magically find the time and energy to maintain it long term.