I'm not up on my open source community politics, but I'm intrigued by the motivations. Let's take it as a given that everything in this post is 100% correct. It certainly sounds like a common enough occurrence. Those 3 antagonists are acting out of malice and greed.

What's the play here? What does one do once one has acquired control of a linux tool or a mailing list or a consortium? Is it just to have power over something? Or is that power useful to some further goal?