What people may have missed was that Tridge handed of the maintenance of rsync 22 years ago to a long-time collaborator, Wayne Davidson, with the promise if he needed any help, to let Tridge know. Twenty two years later, with Tridge literally retired from his day job and sailing and working on open-source drone software for fun, Wayne had some personal issues and asked Tridge for help, and so Tridge stepped back into the maintainership role, keeping a promise he made over two decades ago.

Just as he stepped into that role about 3 months ago, the rsync security emergency happened. So instead of criticizing Tridge for bad judgement, how about commending him for stepping back in when the maintainer that he had handed it off to couldn't continue on? What would you consider a better outcome? If someone like Jia Tan had volunteered to step in instead?