Comment by delsarto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delsarto | Hacker News Reader

Sad to see something implode that has been taken for granted for literally decades. Shows that we should never forget someone is paying for the electricity in the background and finding ways to provide open infrastructure to our projects is an important endeavour. I find [1] similarly odd and it does not fill me with hope for the future.

I would encourage anyone to get involved in real open infrastructure through efforts such as https://opendev.org. Yes, resources are donated, but by a range of providers who have a vested in interest in what the community is producing. ARM64 has been a great example; Linaro providing hardware resources, which has enabled services to perform functional testing and build ARM64 Python wheels for publishing for a number of projects. This is a rising tide that floats all boats. No need to send a resume [2] and you can start contributing immediately [3,4].

It has been good run with IRC but I forsee moving to Matrix as the medium-term future and there's plenty of opportunity for others to get involved with that (building home servers, admining, writing bots that provide the services we current provide on IRC, doc updates, community building).

[1] https://fosshost.org/news/freenode-faq

[2] https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/volunteering-opportunities

[3] https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/

[4] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:opendev%252Fsystem-conf...

It will be hard for people to complain how proprietary services can't be trusted when they can change terms and might pull the plug but apparently that's less of a concern when an open platform imploded so badly.

The open platform didn't implode. The open platform was forked and kept alive. The remaining platform was then made proprietary and then destroyed.

The point of being 'open' isn't to prevent implosions, but to facilitate continuity when, for example, a proprietary commercial interest attempts, say, a hostile takeover.

I really don't see all of OpenDev moving to Matrix - I saw Zuul was considering it, which is unfortunate[1] :/ - now the various projects are going to be fragmented.

1 - I trust there was good reasons, the Zuul folks are great, but it means potentially another chat client for me for channels I use infrequently at best

Moving to Matrix really shouldn't be disruptive, given how easy it is to then bright Matrix back into IRC on whatever network. (Admittedly the Freenode mess has made bridging problematic given the loss of identity/access data on the Freenode side means we don't know who has permission to re-plumb, but we're working on that)

Yeah - looking at the mailing list discussions, it seems people find bridged channels not as "nice"? [1], but in the long run, I think a move to matrix would stave off the "move to slack so I get a GUI / bouncer / etc" discussions that come up a lot.

For all/nearly all of the open infra projects the freenode mess won't be as bad, as we migrated en-mass to OFTC fairly quickly after it kicked off.

1 - From the email: > "I noticed that the rooms which are not bridged to IRC work the best as everyone get the same features."

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