It was all truly unfortunate. But sometimes there are no clear right answers - but you have to make a choice between multiple bad options. When doing nothing isn't an option either then you have to make a call as to what you think the least terrible outcome will be and history will be the judge as to whether you were right.
Similar issues contributed to there being multiple *BSDs. It's never that simple of course, but it was certainly a part of it. Technical/ideology and Personality all play a part.
You've gotta be careful giving vikings a commit bit.
Your best bet for information is probably the mailing list archives. To be a bit reductive, Matt had strong opinions about SMP and threading and got his commit bit yanked. As a result he forked FreeBSD (4?) to create DragonFlyBSD. It's not so far off of how we ended up with OpenBSD really. Or as Linus put it, Theo is⦠difficult.
Honestly, I think these forced forks are good. They're a a perfectly natural result of getting a bunch of smart, opinionated people in a group together. They've given some incredibly smart people a much bigger sandbox to play in. As a result we've got things like openssh and hammer.
