On Freenode and its commitment to FOSS | Hacker News Reader

On Freenode and its commitment to FOSS

freenode.net

52 pointsrasengan15 comments

Andrew Lee's company invested a lot in their new IRCd. The first conflicts after christel sold him ownership of the Freenode LLC were reverting an announcement by staff they were intending to switch to a new IRCd they'd been working on. https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd... This was direct inteference in the server operations, something they claimed would never happen at the time of the sale.

The talk in "On Decentralization" is a continuing part of this thread of behavior.

Which IRCd, even? They used to sponsor one of the developers of InspIRCd but this isn't the case anymore.

There are two sets of contradictory facts being reported in this whole saga. One of the groups must be lying.

Either Ander Lee and friends are lying, or nearly the entire volunteer freenode staff is lying.

Seeing as I have shared a chat room with one of these freenode staffers for over a decade now. Having talked to them on a near daily basis and them never being a bald faced liar, I've got a pretty good idea who is doing the confabulation in this story.

> There are two sets of contradictory facts being reported in this whole saga. One of the groups must be lying.

Or both have different interpretation of the events which emhasizes different aspects.

There are still some key facts in the story that were not communicated (or at least i missed them). Like who owns the infrastructure and who leases the connectivity. Some random persons (who received it in donations)? Freenode ltd? Third party sponsors, who offer it to be used for the IRC network?

> who owns the infrastructure

Third party sponsors, who offer it to be used for the IRC network. Same for the connectivity I imagine.

Of course the fun bit is when you realize the donors have relationship with essentially random staffers. Not with Freenode ltd or with Ander Lee.

As far as I can gather, the ownership of Freenode-the-brand ended up with christel through a technicality. christel then went ahead and sold this to Ander Lee without consulting with any of the other staff. Regardless of whether this move is legal or not, it's quite clearly a dick move.

Freenode-the-network is a combination of the branding plus the community. The branding has been sold. The community is in the process of moving to irc.libera.chat. The whole thing is a bit of a ship of Theseus situation complicated by the fact that all the parts getting replaced and moved around can reasonably be refered to as "freenode".

Edit: Not to mention there is disagreement about some fairly basic facts such as who said what. There's not much room for interpretation there.

> I want to send a clear message to those who disagree - you're not helping FOSS, and your behavior of ritual defamation is toxic at best.

what a completely unprofessional post

archived here (because it likely will be edited): https://archive.is/NH1LN

If it wasn't already obvious, this basically confirms that Freenode is no longer a good place to be. Most projects are migrating to libera.chat while some are migrating to OFTC.

He sure acts like donations of servers grants him some sort of ownership.

What about all the other server donors? Have we heard anything from them?

As far as I've gleamed from the various resignation posts from volunteer freenode staff there's no official agreement between freenode LTD and the other server donors. All the donors have various more-or-less verbal agreements with various of the freenode staff. The assumption seems to be that these donors will move with the staff to libera.chat, though personally I'd expect some donors to go one way and others the other.

All in all it's a rather large mess where I'd trust the word of the volunteer staff over the word of Andrew Lee and friends.

More details from rasengan:

https://gist.github.com/realrasengan/88549ec34ee32d01629354e...

Archival link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210520075012/https://gist.gith...

And even more details:

https://www.kline.sh/

See discussion on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207440

Archival link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210520002957/https://www.kline...

mniip resigns from Freenode:

https://mniip.com/freenode.txt

Archival link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210520153926/https://mniip.com...

When someone says that criticism of bad actions 'damages the community', now I know that's the smell of a bad actor.

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