Reminds me of a recent touch-screen debate.

"Principles of openness and freedom" are great when you're working on your own stuff, more-or-less independent of others, as the LIRC folks seem to have been doing for some time, but when you start to work with others, new considerations can come into play, such as compatibility, comprehensibility, not stepping on toes, demarcation of boundaries, etc., etc. It's called cooperation, and if LIRC is going to be accepted into the main kernel source tree, then the devs are going to have to cooperate with the folks in charge of the main tree.

If everyone working on drivers were to just do whatever they want, without consideration for how the rest of the kernel operates and is maintained, the kernel would have collapsed under the weight of a million tiny incomprehensibly incompatible interfaces (III) a long time ago! That's why "benevolent dictators" are so critical to successful projects.