In regards to your first paragraph, nobody's servers should be crashed.
We have no real evidence to either support or refute Leah's claims, firstly. There are good reasons to suspect one way or the other, but the victim hasn't come forward and all we have from the accused parties are a few stock-standard corporate responses from the FSF. Nothing of any substance either way.
EVEN IF there were, though, the simple fact is that crashing servers will only hurt the software freedom community. If this were Google or some other super-high-traffic website, then your point might make sense (although I still don't believe crashing anyone's servers is ethical). But, in all reality, very few people will be inconvenienced by an outage on any one of these sites. It would just mean some people might not read what these websites have to offer. That's a reduced chance of somebody finding the path to ethical computing- and so both continuing to sacrifice their freedom and empower enemies of freedom with cash and users.
As regards your second paragraph, Trisquel 8.0 will almost certainly be released at some point. The developer is time-poor currently, and so there is a long delay, but there's no inherent reason why that should break the project. I believe some changes should be made (using Debian as a base, in particular), but Trisquel is doing just fine. If the time delay is of concern, there are other free distros available and the option of donating time or money will always be available.
