The ownership chain of Freenode was

1. Rob Levin/Lilo, personally

2. Open Projects Network

3. ???

4. PDPC

5. Christel, personally

6. freenode ltd.

7. Andrew Lee (via freenode ltd)

After PDPC, what christel personally owned to transfer to freenode ltd to sell to Andrew Lee is... hard to define. A domain and a website, sure. But christel didn't own the servers, did not employ people, and does not have any agreement with the users, something which continued into freenode ltd. And apart from the users, operators, servers, and domain, it's not clear what an IRC network is to own.

It seems to have been 2017 (hopefully I recall the year correctly), by transfer of legally owned/registered assets (all that comes to mind immediately that was under non-volunteer ownership is a couple of servers and a domain name or two, but maybe I'm mistaken about that). Of course, I'm not on any side of this, especially not the "inside" (wherever that may be), and I've just read some of the stuff being published by both sides.

In my estimation, the biggest potential problem for Freenode policy that I see is based on the the statements by some departing staffers that indicate the parent company may collect and monetize user data. That would be a pretty shitty outcome. I asked a current (post-split) Freenode staffer about improving privacy measures on the network, and got very encouraging responses, though. Of course, a single staffer is not exactly an ironclad indication of policy. Perhaps the only way to really know how it'll hash out is to wait and see. I plan to keep an eye on the Freenode privacy policy.