Why do you consider it a power grab sooner than, say, people acting in good faith who really believe in their stated values?
Banning someone because they vehemently disagree with you? I mean, that's the only thing I can parse from their statement. It's basically saying, "I do not wish to discuss things with you, so you are banned".
The funny thing is, I don't think that's inherently wrong. In any group, I think you should be able to choose your friends. If you don't want to hang out with someone, then that sucks for that person, but lots of things in life suck. However, banning the co-founder because you no longer wish to talk to them is pretty much the definition of a power grab ;-)
While the moderators never stated their rationale, an unfortunate combination of off-list and on-list replies leaked one of ESR's blocked emails[1] although there were possibly others. Given the context of the discussion, ESR is not only deeply unprofessional here, but also making personal attacks against Coraline Ada Ehmke. Disagreement is OK, attacks are not.
And as Gil notes in that email, how ESR is promoting his cause is actually hurting and undermining open source, not rescuing it. I'd add that such attacks are even more unacceptable when they come from an ex-President or Cofounder.
If I had been the moderator to make that call, I'd even have considered banning ESR without any particular evidence. That guy isn't new to the scene but has a long history of troublesome behavior. Even his first message upon return did not provide anything new to the discussion, so there was no reason to believe that keeping him around would provide any value to anyone. When his messages were largely brushed off (because they contributed no novel points aside from BeInG wRiTtEn By ThE cOfOuNdEr) that only seemed to encourage him to get more extreme, thus running straight into a ban. If not after that message, surely after the next.
[1]: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
And the same adversary behind it as behind so many other similar bannings and near-bannings over the last few years. Does this person actually contribute anything _besides_ tone policing to the many communities they tone police?
It's beginning to feel like his characterization may well be defensible on the grounds of truthfulness.
My initial reaction was to compare your sentiment to nation states and consider it in its extreme to be a justification for despotic behavior, though your comment tries to rule that out. After further consideration I think the OpenBSD example is more illustrative and a more constructive reply. Outside of licensing wars which sometimes happen, there is not always a need to be the "original" fork.
I think maybe part of the problem across the board is a tendency to use analogous thinking to 'raise the stakes' of relatively minor matters by comparing them to very serious matters. It's important to keep ourselves grounded and remember that we're discussing programs, not pogroms.
Ah, but they can't do this freely and effortlessly if they've been labeled as Persona Non Grata in the license by the previous maintainer. (See, it's genius! This is such a great idea, I can't possibly tell what might go wrong with it. "Programs, not pogroms" indeed.)
If people are acting in good faith, I would expect at most something temporary.
This points at what I consider the real problem with CoCs: they're too vague and typically allow people to feel righteous while making truly toxic decisions. This stems from overly-broad language being adopted without an actual "litigation" (in the informal, community sense) of individual cases.