This may be a naive question but why would a vpn company buy an irc network? Is there an overlap?
Either:
1) community
or
2) valuable data
Leaving Freenode for a new network
101–110 of 310 posts
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#102I wonder whether old and long-lasting communities that depend on Freenode (eg. #linux or #openbsd) are going to switch to the new network.
#openbsd is already there, it was the first channel I joined. Not sure about #linux but #debian is there on the new server as well.
The are #debian channels here and there, but the Debian project uses irc.oftc.net (aka irc.debian.org).
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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 fixi…
The main difference is the cost associated with it.
In order to be an non-profit organization you need an founding meeting, board elections and all of it have to be notarized and drawn up by an attorney before being validated by the state an process that takes weeks if not months where as anyone can set up an company online in about 15 minutes.
For some European nations the processes are far more similar and as code civil courts can do their own fact finding you don't need to pay an notary to validate everything or have an attorney draw up a whole bunch of documentation just to found an small non-profit association.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#104IRC seems like drama central. I can’t say I understand the detail of this takeover and split. But the tone of all the messages are very dramatic. Why is that? Is it something inherent in the aggregated community of mods, channels and servers? Some communities seem ripe for drama and I have no idea why.
IRC is inherently an extremely open and fragile protocol. It's effectively a social network, so it attracts all the drama such a network naturally generates, while doing very little to mitigate it. Low barriers to entry, easy pseudonymity, basic but pretty rigid social structures (you either got a flag or you don't)... it's just a volatile mix.
In the end, it's just people bitching on the internet, with only enough features to generate more drama and no extra features to distract you from it.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#105It 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…
I think you may be looking for a CIO, or (in Scotland) a SCIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_incorporated_organi....
Do note, though, that it's insufficient to be a "non-profit" in order to become a "charity". Also, we have more than one type of limited company, and some are more amenable to community interest than others. A company limited by shares will likely have either concentrated or tradable ownership, while a company limited by guarantee is more likely to have a wider membership without so much economic interest.
Going in the other direction, the charity I chair isn't a company at all -- we're an unincorporated association. Which isn't usually the best structure for a charity nowadays, but we make do with what we have.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#106Welp, don't feel like repeating every resignation letter, they are aggregated in this previous post that seems to have been buried: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205926
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#107Earlier 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…
Even if you don't check, other people should know that this is extremely misleading.
> Fewer clients, way more complex protocol
This is actually a valid complaint, though it's partly due to Matrix being pretty young. The other part is that Matrix does a lot more for you than IRC (eg e2ee and federation) and those extra features require complexity.
> The identity server is centralized
This is a completely optional part of Matrix. You don't need identity servers. You never have to provide your phone number. They don't even push you to when you sign up. It exists as a convenience feature for people who complain that they need to be able to discover their friends on Matrix by their friends‘ phone numbers. Also, you're free to run your own identity server for you and your friends or whomever.
> other attempts [at creating a homeserver] appear dead
This one is way off. Synapse, the "one complete server" you must be referring to, is going to be deprecated. The Matrix Foundation team is working on Dendrite to replace it. There are also several independent projects that are very active, notably Conduit, started by one guy unaffiliated with the Matrix Foundation team. Conduit is extremely far along and is under constant development.
> All of Matrix is controlled by New Vector LLC
The people who created Matrix were careful to separate their for-profit projects from FOSS community projects. Matthew Hodgson (Arathorn) explains it well here [0]. TLDR: The Matrix spec, the Element clients, and the Synapse/Dendrite homeservers are maintained by a nonprofit. Same team, different organization and funding. Everything is open source, so anyone is free to fork at any time.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#108It's interesting to me that the draft was censored and mentioned a buyer, while this one only talks about control. For me, it paints the situation worse. Still sad to see FreeNode fall. This will lead to a lot of split communities and dead links. EDIT: Fuchs finds some harsher words[0]: > In the past few weeks, this has changed[2], and the existance of a legal threat to freenode has become apparent. We cannot know th…
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Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#109Earlier 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…
Not that I disagree with you, but it's pretty reasonable for someone to defend his product when it's criticized.
Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network
#110IRC seems like drama central. I can’t say I understand the detail of this takeover and split. But the tone of all the messages are very dramatic. Why is that? Is it something inherent in the aggregated community of mods, channels and servers? Some communities seem ripe for drama and I have no idea why.
This is the first IRC drama I'm hearing about. There is more drama in issue trackers of random GitHub projects that surface once a month on HN. I don't know where this perception of IRC comes from. Such a comment shows up under every link commenting on the matter. But it's still just one case.
> This is the first IRC drama I'm hearing about.
How old are you? For my generation (40+), IRC and drama are basically synonyms. It seems to have subsumed a lot simply because younger folks don't use it as much as we did.