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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

You can see Lee lying about their acquisition of freenode on HN a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614362

> Freenode is a non profit organization that benefits from support from Private Internet. It is not owned by Private Internet. We are serious fans of IRC and the open source community, so it makes sense for us to divert profits to orgs like freenode among others.

> To be clear, we also donate to other orgs: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-spo... Our new merged company will continue to do the same as we are in fact the same company going forward - just much better resourced.

They're all a bunch of shady scammers. I don't understand why people trust the freenode staff either, since they evaded or demured when challenged about selling freenode to scammers years ago.

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I don't think anybody trusts christel anymore, but I'm not sure why any of the other staff would be implicated in the sale. As far as they all claim, anyway, they were not aware that Andrew Lee believed/claimed he had ownership of the network; and in fact they claim they were all promised by christel that this was not the case.

They knew he got the domain name, not that he claimed to own the rest and the users data. They had his promise that he would not involve himself in the governance.

Said promise is in writing, but only has a few chats message, nothing official (they are a bunch of volunteers doing that for a couple decades as friends, hard to fault them).

Christel seemed to sell out, and when she got kicked out of her op at freenode by other staff Lee came out of the shadows.

She wasn't "kicked out"; she resigned rather than answer certain questions, as was her right.

Freenode staffers were lied to by the person who made the sale. Read their resignation letters, some are very detailed.

Do you have evidence to support the implication (for Lee to be lying, as you claim) that Freenode is owned by Private Internet Access?

Well, from the current front page of freenode.net:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210520103526/https://freenode....

"The rumors of a 'hostile takeover' are simply untrue - I've been the guardian and owner of freenode since 2017, when Christel, the former owner approached me and asked if I was interested in purchasing it, as we had in previous years discussed this."

Andrew Lee ≠ Private Internet Access

Lee owning the domain does not make him an owner of freenode. It's a community project.

He owns Freenode Limited: https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/05/19/freenode_file.pdf

As above, Andrew Lee said Freenode was not owned by Private Internet Access.

It doesn’t appear he was lying, because by all accounts he owned it personally.

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