Freenode sucks

I specifically made zero comments on freenode's policy. My comment was specifically about Bram's demeanor and his interactions with the admin. I realize that he's good at what he does and contributed a lot, but it's like seeing someone being awfully rude to a waiter, it just gives you a sense of who they are as a person. You can tell a lot about a person at how they handle the inanity of everyday life, like for instance, unreasonable nickname retention policies.

On the contrary, I find stuff like this highly interesting and consider myself a hacker. I found the comments between Calacanis and Aaron Wall the most awesome stuff I read on Hacker News in the past week, to be honest, and the way I found those was by looking at the HN top rated comments.

It would be interesting to hear other hacker's feelings before we decide what is best for the community.

So, I'm not "one of the most well known and respected people in the whole open source community" and I'm not as socially inept as Bram, but I, too, had some issues getting things done on FreeNode, and I sympathize with his frustration.

The #webmin channel had been claimed by someone unrelated to the project, and who we had no prior contact with; it wasn't a hostile thing, but they hadn't logged in for months, weren't dealing with trolls and had opened access to the topic to everyone (so the topic was being abused for all sorts of ridiculous stuff). We were unable to contact the person directly, so I tried taking over ownership of the channel through the official means. After a year of just waiting (because I'd been warned it was a very slow process, and I don't spend a lot of time in IRC these days), I chimed in on the operators channel, and spoke with a couple of folks. All were nice, friendly folks, but weren't able or willing to do anything about solving our problems with the channel. I believe in the end I was told that our application would be brought to the front of the queue because of the ongoing problems, and how long we'd been waiting. I don't know what, if anything, happened with that; it was at least 8 months ago. I never heard anything about it, anyway, and the last time I logged in, I don't think we had ops on #webmin.

So, Bram is a bit of a douche. This is pretty well-known; anyone that has ever met him or interacted with him knows that socially he is inept (and Asperger's gets bandied about as the reason, though I don't think that really accounts for lack of online social graces). I look past it because intellectually he's brilliant, and ethically he seems solid, so two out of three aint bad; in short, he means well, but he can be mean about it. Even in terms of helping people, within the limits of his social graces, he is generous with his time in helping folks use and understand his code. We all have our flaws, and the FreeNode processes and policies and lack of staff to deal appropriately with those process and policies can frustrate someone with the patience of Job. Bram definitely does not have the patience of Job.

So, to sum up: A 60 day expiry on accounts is idiotic. The official channel registration process, while well-meaning, is baroque and seems to leave a lot of channels in a lurch of having no operator or an abusive operator for months or years. Bram is kind of an asshole. But we still like FreeNode and we still like Bram.

I had forgotten about this and it changes my feelings about his encounter with the admins. Everyone on the autism spectrum that I've known in my daily life was very rude. If he truly has a mild form of autism then publicly flogging his actions is insensitive and overkill. There's a real difference between the stereotypical rude entitled college student, and someone with a real medical problem. The real question to ask is should he have known better. It's reasonable to suggest that perhaps he did not.

"Cohen never sought a formal diagnosis but turned his considerable attention to the matter"

Self-diagnosis. Are you fucking kidding me?

Just because you were picked on in highschool and are a huge pain in the ass to work with, doesn't mean you have Aspergers.

Guess what, Bram Cohen's probably just an asshole who writes good software.