Tl;dw Andrew Lee, owner of the freenode domain and major financer for the network has taken over the freenode irc. Lee claims in the blog post that despite being a major financial contributer, Lee has no control of the network. When Lee attempted to gain access and add new staff, he was denied it by the volunteer staff. The volunteers disagreed with Lee’s attempts to gain control, and have written letters of resignation as a result of Lee’s takeover
In addition to the following
If you have a irc on freenode, read the following articles and discussion to make an informed decision to stay or leave. As of the current moment, it appears some L1/linux/foss channels are hosted on freenode
I am not sure about all that is being said. I have read statements from both sides and they both have relevant points and odd reasoning to do so. There is some corporate weirdness over transferring of stakes. There is finger pointing half truthes from both sides. There is some very weird stuff going on.
But over all I don’t see why they staff have acted like they did, it does not look like anything critical changed just that they had assumed ownership on what amounts to squatters rights and when the actual owner tried to do literally anything and found they couldn’t, asserted their legal rights and the staff threw a wobbler and made a big show of it, meanwhile things just kept going despite them.
Edit: from what I have read so far this is not a sudden take over. He has owned it for years and just left it work away, it is only now that he wanted to do something which has not been made clear. So already the characterising by staff is based on a seeming lie
The freenode guys sold out to the PIA people years ago on a promise nothing would change. New Owners since altered the deal.
The engineers leaving is fair, but that’s the consequences of selling out. The owners kinda own it, like it or not?
That’s the thing. I have no stake in anything here so don’t know what changes are being talked about. All I hear is “ChAnGeS!11! WeRe LeaVinG” but so far it looks like nothing has changed and there was no altered deal. They are just suddenly mad and making noise.
It is understandable to complain about an open source project being shuttered like that, but it happens every now and then. And, the owners might keep the project going, separate to the fork.
But even in that, there has been no shuttering, no changing, nor drastic difference.
I am more suspect of the staff and their libre chat, why they want that level of access and ownership and are worried they no longer have it as they used to before. What are they up to with this all. If all they cared about was running the various channels and servers, they could still do all of that on freenode, it has not gone away but their little bit of power has been challenged and they want to remain king and ruler is really what it sounds like.
I didn’t look too closely, but when the lead engineer is complaining about the owner using people’s Published and Public data for their own ends, I also don’t see a problem with that but I’m a stub who does not see the changes that go on down the road, or the ways in which the network is commercialised.
I’m gonna wait, see what Noah Chelsio has to say. I barely used freenode in the last few years, so no skin off my nose
Yeah that is a concerning thing to hear, but what is it based on is what I mean. They is for now only word versus word and with seemingly no cause for the reaction other than a wake up call that the staff do not in fact own the service which should have been clear all along.
It could be as bad as they say but right now it is an odd thing to read where there are suddenly many voices complaining about something that has not yet and may never happen with no evidence for what they are saying, and on the other side one clear message from a single point that looks to have the history and lineage to backup what they have been saying.
If it is as bad as the staff say, they have really not gone about it in a way that exudes confidence in their abilities to run things as they all seem scattered and quick to react.
They for sure are throwing their toys out the pram.
But if the talent leaves, then the product is basically abandoned.
I am also not sure which of them were paid, and what they thought the implications of taking money from an entity were.
It seems the owners promised no interference, but anyone knows they can and will change that timing down the line.
But there is more I Don’t know than there is that I do
I guess one metric of the court of public opinion would be how many and which projects move to libera.chat, or just away from Freenode. Have you heard about any large movements out of Freenode to other platforms? For users or sponsors?
This kinda reminds me of when github was bought by microsoft and some people/projects moved to gitlab or other places.
I haven’t found the smoking gun or the shovel that was used to bury the bodies yet. It does sound like finger pointing and they said/it said at this point, but I sure there are things we don’t know. I think the biggest question in my mind is, if this isn’t a hostile takeover, why was there such a heavy handed approach to assert control? Maybe I don’t understand it because I don’t own multiple corporations and I’m not sovereign royalty, and I just can’t relate to those types of first world problems?
He has not owned it for years. Freenode ltd was set up to host live events, it wasn’t supposed to have any ownership of the network or any of its assets (and in fact, it did not, until a former head of security of the network supposedly sold things that weren’t hers to sell (that being the domain), ergo, that “sale” is legally dubious)
He is quite simply claiming ownernship of things he has no rights to and the (former) Staff is not fighting it because the guy is a millionaire (or billionaire, whatever) so they’d just get crushed by sheer force of money.
It should also be noted that Freenode ltd doesn’t own any of Freenode’s infrastructure, that being donated by individuals and organisations, so if those decide to move with the (now) Libera Chat sysops that means Freenode will basically cease to exist due to no servers to run on, unless Lee manages to procure hardware (and people willing to manage it)
Lilo is turning in his grave. What a disaster.
Anyway, it seems most projects are jumping ship, if not to Libera Chat then to OFTC, or just off of IRC entirely. Libera Chat has overtaken OFTC in size already, and is likely to overtake Freenode as well.
Major projects that have moved to Libera Chat so far (that I’m aware of):
BastilleBSD
CentOS
CouchDB
curl
Devuan
IRCv3
Rocky Linux
PostgreSQL
Ubuntu
Wikipedia/Wikimedia
Maybe of some note, the large FOSDEM (the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting) conference has moved to Libera Chat as well.
Both #vim and #emacs made the move as well, although neither are “official” channels, as far I understand.
Maybe of note, when the PIA involvement became known, years ago, Debian moved to OFTC, guess they saw the writing on the wall.
