The cryptographic framework teams of operating system projects have not generally been great sources of authority on cryptographic engineering, which is a much narrower speciality than a lot of people think it is.
That doesn't make them incompetent! The lawyer comparison is a telling one. I have a lawyer I work with on contract review that I think is amazing. But that doesn't mean he's my best source of wisdom about litigation, because litigation is a very specific speciality of law practice, and most lawyers don't do it. Just like the OS crypto developers, he has to know a lot of stuff about litigation to do his job, and I respect that. But that doesn't make him a litigator.
The LRNG developers thought they were accomplishing something quite important with the /dev/random reseeding/blocking system. But as you've seen from the man page update, the consensus is, that thing they were trying to accomplish was in fact counterproductive.
That doesn't make them incompetent! The lawyer comparison is a telling one. I have a lawyer I work with on contract review that I think is amazing. But that doesn't mean he's my best source of wisdom about litigation, because litigation is a very specific speciality of law practice, and most lawyers don't do it. Just like the OS crypto developers, he has to know a lot of stuff about litigation to do his job, and I respect that. But that doesn't make him a litigator.
The LRNG developers thought they were accomplishing something quite important with the /dev/random reseeding/blocking system. But as you've seen from the man page update, the consensus is, that thing they were trying to accomplish was in fact counterproductive.