I spent a good portion of my early career working with Drupal on large-scale media sites and got to know some folks central to the movement. I liked almost everyone I met, including Dries, but after starting my own agency, left the platform and the community. Not because of individual conflicts, but because I concluded that I did not want my agency to orbit Acquia. This is what happens in commercially mature open source communities, and a huge source of mundane conflict. The founder and BDFL of the movement becomes the founder and BDFL of a venture funded, IPO-bound startup, and incentives start to become crossed. Or in the case this case, incentives become entirely perverted.

So I have a darker take on this: Dries banned Crell as a face-value reason to strip a competitor of a seat at the core contributor table. Crell works for Platform.sh, a challenger to Acquia's main hosting platform product. Drupal has lots of very senior architectural voices already, so losing Crell isn't going to jeopardize the platform, and it's more convenient for Acquia for them to work in the same place.

According to Crell's post about this [https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing], the Drupal Association apparently attempted to apply their code of conduct and found repeatedly that Crell had done nothing wrong. But then Dries decided to ban Crell with little fanfare. Hard to believe that Dries cares that much about Crell's sex life. Easy to believe that he's become a cutthroat opportunist who would use the Code of Conduct to optimize Acquia's outcomes. What would have happened if Crell had worked for Acquia?

That's the thing about a BDFL. Give him enough VC money and ultimately all that's left is a giant D.