"...it would be unfair to imply that most Linux
petitioners are like that. Generally, the people organizing
petitions are polite, well-mannered folk who are just trying to
show that there's maybe more of a market for a given manufacturer's
hardware than said manufacturer might have realized without the
help of a collection of signatures saying "If you support us, we'll
buy your stuff."
The petitioner in this case, though, wasn't polite or
well-mannered. The individual in question was rude, demanding, and
happy to include in his letter to the editor (that'd be me) his
belief that the people manufacturing the product were "total morons
for not giving away the specs to their crappy hardware" and that a
petition would teach them a lesson they wouldn't soon forget.
Evidently, if the letter was to be believed, the petitioner had
called up their tech support line and demanded a rundown of the
protocols in use on the device, and let them know what morons they
were before hanging up.
The wording of the petition itself was equally nasty, if along
separate lines that ran more to "condescending" and "threatening,"
pointing out to the company that it needed to give up the
specifications to its hardware right now so someone in the Linux
community could go to work making its product work "correctly."