More for the list… These probably don’t all fit the same template, but maybe just shed some light on how things react to change.
debian → devuan
centos → rockyos
cyanogenmod → lineage
Micheal Keaton Batman films → ???
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.
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Gentoo also decided to move networks: Gentoo IRC presence moving to Libera Chat – Gentoo Linux
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And jellyfin
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I will read the whole thing later, but could someone tl;dr this. I use freenode IRC for things like #ansible and #freeipa. What is going on here?
Sorry no tl;dr. I’m not sure I understand all the issues myself, but I just ran across these…
I believe that @ariadneconill is affiliated with alpine linux and I am probably understating that relationship.
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Woah, that’s an interesting read, gives more information about Andrew Lee’s motivations behind the takeover (maintaining the service he used during his formative years). It unique in humanizing Lee
Ariadne’s biggest concern is that Lee’s maintenance of the IRC he grew up on comes at the cost of not taking criticism and users + projects leaving
Looks like a lot of the incriminating stuff is being torn down.
Libel / Slander suits aren’t quite as big here as in the US, but depends how much money and pettiness the people involved are packing.
Bad sign though. If you can’t stand by what you posted, you know?
We’ve all regretted stuff we said as kids, but ah… don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
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What did I miss? Where’d the libel/slander angle come from?
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I read that article, and there must be stuff that was not included because I still don’t understand for the calls to abandon Freenode.
Can someone explain why it’s being suggesting to stop using Freenode?
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I’ll make an attempt…
Someone, namely Andrew Lee, is trying to claim ownership of the Freenode IRC network through acquiring ownership of the, extremely loosely related Freenode Ltd, an organisation set up for Freenode live events, entirely separate from the IRC network. The only thing they have in common is the name.
Freenode (the IRC network) has always existed solely by the grace of its supporters. Aside from the domain name Freenode doesn’t really have operational costs. The sysops are all volunteers, and all the server power is donated by various third parties.
The whole existence of Freenode is (or rather, was) based on the relationship of the staff with the sponsors (that being the people that provide the servers). Iow, if the staff goes, so does that relationship.
The idea behind Freenode was that it couldn’t be owned, because it doesn’t exist as a legal entity. This avoids agenda pushing (though, of course, the sysops are still humans, with everything that entails. Still it’s as much a meritocracy as is possible, certainly more than anything “owned” by a single entity) Claiming ownership of Freenode at the very least goes against the very idea behind the IRC network.
I can’t think of any good reason to want to “own” Freenode anyway, certainly none that are good. Some power-trip? Ability to silence “unwanted” speech, or people? Selling the user-data, potentially? (but really, what would the information in NickServ/ChanServ be worth?) Forcing the network in a specific direction? (this appears to be one of the reasons, based on some of the stuff Andrew has written)
It should also be noted that, unlike “modern” chat systems all the data you send to an IRC server is visible to said server. Trust in an IRC network is entirely based on the trust in the people operating it. Freenode now being hijacked means that some party with unclear intentions now has potential access to everything that’s being said on Freenode (which includes “private” conversations), among other data (like all the nick registrations with NickServ, which includes email addresses)
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TL;DR: I am speculating.
Person A said Y, person B said in a public forum “you are attempting to bribe me” person A begins removing evidence, but person B being of integrity does not.
Sometimes this is exploited to justify lawsuits.
An unfounded accusation of bribery is just as much slander here as it is anywhere else.
The individual accused of all the bad behaviour is believed by a significant number of Open Source projects to be acting outside of the best interests of said projects. Admittedly such a suit would be nail in coffin, but you never know.
Awesome summary.
I wonder if the support for things like power and throughput will dry up now?
This said, I wonder what percentage of traffic has dropped out already?
I think Ubuntu was the biggest project on there wasn’t it? They moved, other big ones have.
Perhaps this has all been a cost reduction effort? 
I really like that explanation, it has been linked at the top
Has anyone linked JRS’s take on it?
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If anyone needed some more convincing to get the hell off of the husk of what used to be Freenode: policy update (#513) · freenode/web-7.0@1194a3e · GitHub
Simply put, any channel that publicly announces migration to elsewhere gets hijacked by Freenode “staff”. After that anyone can request Founder privileges (friend of my did for a local *nix community channel, where he was oper,but not owner. Dropped the channel afterwards, of course, since we have no intention of supporting the behaviour of the current staff). Meaning now is the time to hijack some former official channels (I hear #ubuntu and #gentoo are up for grabs 
)…
The second diff is quite telling as well, at least I don’t see any good reason to scrap clauses against racism and the like.
On another note, Irssi, one of the major open source IRC clients, officially updated its default IRC network from Freenode to Libera Chat.
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Channel takeovers have started
#curl https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1397433855817170949
#hardenedbsd https://twitter.com/HardenedBSD/status/1397516575561879557
#fosdem https://twitter.com/fosdem/status/1397454352835653632
… just to name a few
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Who needs reality TV?
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During “normal” times, I can see asserting channel ownership as an admin tool, for various legitimate reasons. I don’t disagree with having that mechanism in place for truly abandoned channels or other situations.
That being said, in the last few days, the patterns of behavior point in other directions. I won’t go so far to say that these tools seem to be used in bad faith or for ulterior motives, but it sure looks that way.
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Escalation… what does the new owner actually want to do with freenode? Seems like they’re just ruining it for no reason.
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