Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

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This has been debunked.

Freenode was sold to me by Christel, the previous owner. I did not even offer to purchase it and simply assumed I was doing what I had been doing for a decade for freenode and many other FOSS projects - keeping them alive. It was my funds that did so the whole time for freenode (and a number of other projects which I stopped funding thereafter given the death threats I was receiving which led to the end of many of them unfortunately).

The Libera staff [1] attempted to steal the domain because they wanted control. None of the staff were developers at the time and complained they couldn’t even write their own irc client. Think of Mozilla. The people who run it aren’t the coders. Same thing.

Here are the receipts for every statement I just made:

http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/lee-side.pd...

PS: Freenode seems more active then Libera where everyone is just idle (bots?) but that is another point. See for yourself with the client I wrote: IRC.com.

[1] By Libera staff I mean the former freenode staffers who left to form Libera. These are the same people I spent a lot of money helping to protect legally from the allegations made by “OldCoder”

Could it be that the original freenode staff did not want to have anything to do with you in an operational manner? Whilst the financial contributions for legal defense always went a long way, not much else was needed, like the live events and freenode branded merch. Staff were not adequately informed as to how the sale went down. Later, I do not believe tomaw was trying to strongarm anyone into leaving, staff genuinely wanted nothing to do with the supposed crown prince of Joseon.

Ultimately, the people who invested their labor into the network felt like they had little control over the future of the project and felt like they had been rug pulled by christel so they left. They did not believe that it was christel's to sell. Ultimately, as soon as the original operators left, the new management have not necessarily left a great impression. For a while, freenode.net would just redirect to a subreddit? And then later it was a reddit clone of sorts? (https://web.archive.org/web/20220505184527/https://freenode....). Channels were taken over at will. There were somewhat dubious partnerships made, crypto products endorsed. The first blog posts made by the new management straight after the changeover were markedly different from the previous messaging - (https://web.archive.org/web/20210730233709/https://freenode....). The original freenode was doing its best to be a place where like minded people could collaborate and communicate without adding too much of a political sway or coloring anything, the freenode after the takeover did not aspire to do any such thing. If in May of 2021 one could've argued that the old staff were a tad too eager to leave, then the newcomers did everything in their power to prove them right in less than a month.

Please do fund FOSS stuff, it really helps. Just don't expect to buy yourself out of being cringeworthy.

Thanks for this as it was a bit more thoughtful and an almost accurate depiction.

However, there are some discrepancies:

1. The ex staffers were already preparing their takeover event long before my name came in the picture. Domain registration dates and meeting minutes notes proves this. I was likely an easier target than Christel - or maybe that’s why she asked me to buy it from her.

2. The ex staffers had already begun emailing false narratives to open source projects before any of these actions began.

The channel topic changes did occur as a result of #2, but timing and reasoning is important. I do, however, think that these actions were a mistake.

Today, it’s pointless to fund FOSS projects since many of these funds end up going to non developers who are good at socializing but not meaningful development. Instead it’s better to support individual developers.

The whole community fled from Freenode as a direct consequence of your actions. You aren't convincing anyone with your "debunkings," dear masterdebater.

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