I'm just a systems software guy, I don't know anything more than anyone else on Donnefeld's true motivations. The old saying is where's smoke there's fire. If Salter had intellectual integrity he would have dug into Donnefeld's past, and asked pointed and direct questions about vulnerability disclosure and how he intends to work with or against people that compete with him in the future. All I know is what is obvious to anyone else who spends 15 minutes looking into things. When a reporter spends DAYS digging up details on Matt yet fails to mention anything about the governance and flamboyant history of WG (the NetBSD incident is a carbon copy minus the salacious clickbait of Matt), what the heck is actually going on here? I think Salter is just stupid rather than a fully aware actor in all this. Donnefeld appears to have some kind of fundamental personality flaw that facilitates using people to inflate his ego.. this became such a big deal because he compromised another FreeBSD developer who never fully took responsibility nor publicly rebuked being used by a narcissist.

Donnefeld was a nobody in the kernel development community, comes out of nowhere with a relatively simple tunneling protocol that is tightly bound to certain design and implementation decisions, and continually insists implementation is inseparable from the protocol. Noobs celebrate this. Pros look at this and wonder what happens when the governance fails for any reason, when the crypto becomes outdated, how it evolves. Pros celebrate independent implementation because it means a general solution has been achieved and stands a good chance of lasting beyond one person, one company, and one implementation.