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Why does it make someone a bad internet citizen to implement internet protocols? Is there something official about the Linux kernel (the insecure, buggy, and written-in-C Linux kernel). I would start clean-sheet for a lot of reasons, mostly security, but I don't know what that has to do with my internet virtues.

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No, there's nothing official about the Linux kernel implementation. Though you could make the case for BSD...

That aside, the reason it makes you a bad citizen is the lack of follow through. If you're a small organization writing a network implementation, you know from the start that your implementation is unlikely to get the decade+ of follow-through that is necessary to fix your interoperability problems. Instead you're putting that cost on every other internet host that is going to have to interact with your out-of-spec implementation until the day the last instance of your code is shut down.

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