I have been on Freenode for the last 10 to 20 years but I have absolutely no clue what this is all about. Neither this resignation letter nor the last explains it very well other than that the resigning staff apparently wants me to quit Freenode and join their network instead. I see no compelling reason to do so. Understanding whether there is some "substance" to this drama appears completely impossible. [removed snip] Really, if you can't explain why your cause is just to someone like me, who cares a lot of software freedom, you will not reach a majority of Freenode's users either.
Leaving Freenode for a new network
51–60 of 310 posts
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#52I don't know about the process of the sale/takeover of Freenode, but I'm a long time PIA user and have a fair amount of trust and goodwill for London Trust Media (the owner of PIA and now Freenode). - PIA is much better designed for privacy than many competitors - They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing - They have been fairly open with how their tech…
London Trust Media was sold and most of those things were the doing of the old owners.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#53It seems inevitable that any Good company with great TOS with promises to never turn can be bought and changed towards evil. We've seen it time and time again. It's inevitable? How can we structure these organisations from creation so that this cannot happen? freenode believed the purchaser promises. What should they have done differently?
It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject to all the normal procedures surrounding companies like sales, and still tend to have one or a few owners who are solely in charge of everything.
By comparison, many other European countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, …) have specific types of legal entities for associations that have appropriate restrictions on what can be done with them. For example, they can generally not be sold, are required to be internally democratic with fixed statutes, usually (but not always) have open membership and an elected board. I think that would go a long way to fixing these recurrent issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization_laws_by...
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#54If this leads to a mass exodus from Freenode, it'll probably significantly reduce overall IRC usage. Communities will fracture, people will set up random splinter networks that will die off in a few months, and lots of open-source projects that already want to be using something Javascripty like Slack or Discord are going to use this as the motivating thing to make the switch. Personally I'm staying put on Freenode b…
How many would move to Matrix?
Why does it matter? Matrix is no IRC. Fewer clients, way more complex protocol, the identity server is centralized, only one complete server implementation exists (and it seems like that's the only one that will ever exist, other attempts appear dead, despite the list on matrix.org) and worse than Freenode being owned by private capital, all of Matrix is controlled by New Vector LLC -- the protocol, the clients, and the biggest servers, and they operate the main identity server so they can keep track of your phone number or email address and map it to your Matrix ID. (I wonder when they'll start selling that data?) If this situation with Freenode makes you move to Matrix you're choosing to move to a network with all the same problems you're fleeing, but magnified
Oh but there's one more thing about Matrix
If you don't like it, the CEO of the company will come argue with you about it here
I don't check for replies to my comments on HN because this community is too toxic but I'll bet Arathorn eventually comments to tell me I'm wrong. Maybe he'll promise that they don't sell the vector.im identity data. I don't trust him, anyway.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#55If this leads to a mass exodus from Freenode, it'll probably significantly reduce overall IRC usage. Communities will fracture, people will set up random splinter networks that will die off in a few months, and lots of open-source projects that already want to be using something Javascripty like Slack or Discord are going to use this as the motivating thing to make the switch. Personally I'm staying put on Freenode b…
How many would move to Matrix?
[deleted]
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the connection to PIA? EDIT: Andrew Lee is founder of PIA. From Wikipedia: > The company was founded by the American-born Andrew Lee.[6][7] London Trust Media also owns the Freenode IRC network.[8][failed verification]
It's not owned by PIA now. PIA and London Trust Media was sold by Lee; who moved most other holdings to "Imperial Family Companies", which is effectively the owner of freenode: https://imperialfamily.com
So interesting it seems he's going all in on the royalty branding using Korea's former royal house's seal. I saw a news article of him being named 'crown prince' of Korea by one of the pretenders to the throne despite not being closely related.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#57For somebody with zero context: what are the implications of this?
a popular IRC network has been taken over by a private owner. The users don't like that and are leaving. It was around for a long time so for many of those users it's effecting them negatively. I would imagine that these users could start a new network? If you were not part of the community you are likely not impacted.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#58More info from Fuchs: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2021q2/006888.h... :( It's bad news.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many would move to Matrix?
Why does it matter? Matrix is no IRC. Fewer clients, way more complex protocol, the identity server is centralized, only one complete server implementation exists (and it seems like that's the only one that will ever exist, other attempts appear dead, despite the list on matrix.org) and worse than Freenode being owned by private capital, all of Matrix is controlled by New Vector LLC -- the protocol, the clients, and…
You're right. Matrix is no IRC. But it's an order of magnitude better than Facebook Messenger.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#60It seems inevitable that any Good company with great TOS with promises to never turn can be bought and changed towards evil. We've seen it time and time again. It's inevitable? How can we structure these organisations from creation so that this cannot happen? freenode believed the purchaser promises. What should they have done differently?
It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject to all the normal procedures surrounding companies like sales, and still tend to have one or a few owners who are solely in charge of everything. By comparison, many other European countries (Ge…
you can write whatever restrictions you want to apply to the company into its founding articles of association/memorandum, which are the legal documents which state what the company is allowed to do and how it is to be operated
however most of the off-the-shelf Articles tend to be completely unrestricted (for obvious reasons)