The Ardour project has used Freenode for more than 16 years as our primary coordinating and realtime support platform.

I (the project lead) also used IRC back in the 80s and early 90s.

Here's what IRC is to me (I'm not speaking for everyone involved in Ardour):

  * a protocol
  * an accessible server
  * a channel (or two), with a founder and at least one operator

If those things are all functioning, then I really don't care at all about anything going on "behind the scenes". I don't care who does what on the server, I don't care who owns the server, I don't care what the plan is for the ownership of the server. I don't care if there are controversial channels somewhere. I don't care if the server admins are fighting. I don't care where the servers are (*). I don't care about channel creation policies. I don't care about ANY of this, as long as those three things continue to function normally.

The only exception to this is when there is (as there was last year or the year before) a coordinate DDOS attack on the servers. In the situation, I do care that the server admins are competent and have the tools to do what needs to be done. In the case of that attack (which IIRC also somehow centered on Christel in some way), the Freenode admins did what needed to be done, and I thank them for it.

The service that Freenode offered the FOSS community was to make those 3 things available at no charge for our projects. This was (and remains) enormously valuable. But nothing else about Freenode is of importance to me. It could be owned by Google as long as those 3 things work in the right way. I prefer to be using an infrastructure maintained by people with some ideological preference that supports the work we do, but realistically speaking, on a day to day basis, it makes no difference. I'm the operator in #ardour, and as long as the network ops stay out, allow me to set channel modes and other policies, their existence is something I can remain almost entirely blissfully ignorant of.

I don't want to have to care about what is happening at Freenode at all. What we get from IRC is completely orthogonal to the beliefs and behaviors of anyone behind the scenes. I'd prefer that it remains that way, but it seems as if everyone behind the scenes is telling me that I'm supposed to care.

(*) anyone imagining that IRC has any degree of privacy doesn't understand IRC. Ergo, whether the servers are in the US, or the EU, or southern Africa makes no difference to the content that I'm willing to read or write on an IRC channel.