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“Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

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Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#201

Post by edgyquant »

rasengan wrote: post #99
wut42 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There will be few noticeable changes in terms of day-to-day operations, the freenode project will continue to operate with much the same structure and volunteer base as it does now

It did until I was locked out of the dns and an internal reorganization and structure was put in place. The screenshots from former staff agenda is on the PDF. I don’t wish to be on irc 24/7 contrary to what people might or might not think.

> I don’t wish to be on irc 24/7 contrary to what people might or might not think.

then why acquire freenode?

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#202

Post by mynameisvlad »

pedrocr wrote: post #184
mynameisvlad wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, the part that is unclear is how much “freenode limited” owns. The core of freenode- the servers themselves- are sponsored and owned by third parties. The volunteers maintaining the infrastructure are not affiliated with the corporation either. So really what this whole mess has boiled down to is what is the delineation between freenode limited and freenode-the-volunteer-run-sponsored-network. Andrew believ…

> the former staff believe he only owns the name, trademark, and potentially the website/domain That's my reading too but apparently the staff did hand over the network on their way out. So now freenode is apparently actually consolidated into the Freenode Limited company with both the name/DNS/trademark and the network itself. The legal situation behind those moves is not public and is probably the only thing left t…

It just goes back to my point, though, what is "the network" and what can any one person or group of people hand over?

The ssh keys to the servers? Sure, but that doesn't mean freenode ltd now owns the servers or the software running on them. They've just been given operational control over them (which I guess is exactly what Andrew wanted at the end of the day) but who exactly owns "the network" if that's even possible is still incredibly murky, at least to me.

A "network" is a very nebulous thing when everything is informal and run by volunteers and sponsors.

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#203

Post by soneil »

AlexandrB wrote: post #6

As an outsider who hasn't used IRC or Freenode in over a decade, this situation is impenetrable. Neither the posts by the Freenode volunteers nor this post by Andrew paint a coherent narrative I can follow (maybe I'm just old). Best I can gather, the flashpoint that triggered this series of events is a dispute over the control of the freenode domain name and DNS servers?

The best I can piece together so far:

* freenode was run by elected volunteers.

* Lee stepped in to sponsor/fund the Freenode Live events

* Some assets were sold/transferred to Lee in the process of this

* Former staff admin leaves, new staff admin is elected

* New staff admin attempts to take control of assets they (reasonably) assume they should have control of

* Lee (reasonably) perceives this as control of assets being taken away from him - it's at this point we discover more about which assets were sold/transferred.

* Recent events driven by elected leadership discovering they're not actually leadership.

Essentially freenode has had a leadership vacuum for some time, and has been perfectly comfortable with that. But nature abhors a vacuum ..

You might note I have two groups marked as (reasonably) in opposite directions. As far as I can tell this is an information gap - what was sold/transferred was kept very, very quiet, so I do believe each side was behaving reasonably with the information available to them. So I believe what we're seeing this week, is what we would have seen during the actual sale, if these details were made remotely public at the time.

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#206

Post by tptacek »

generalizations wrote: post #139
tptacek wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep saying this, and people keep telling you they have read the PDF. Perhaps it's helpful for you to hear this stated plainly: the PDF is inscrutable, and does not say clearly what you seem to believe it does. The announcement you link to here is itself clear as mud and has been quoted by your opponents. It says Freenode and PIA are "joining forces", "in the same family", but "continue to operate as a not-for-pr…

> the PDF is inscrutable I was able to follow it pretty easily. What did you have trouble with?

Sure, if it's helpful:

* Its central claim, that PIA or Lee or whoever directed a bunch of money to Freenode or people involved with freenode, isn't contested by anyone. There's no record to set straight there.

* It spends the bulk of its time talking about a problem Lee seems to have with Thomas Welsey ("tomaw", I think?) --- but the logs with "tomaw" seem relatively civil? It's not really even clear what the problem here is.

* The public announcement from Christel and the IRC logs make it pretty clear that the Freenode operator community believed Lee was to have no operational role managing Freenode. What seems to have upset Lee here is a reorganization of Freenode's operational management, and something about who has the login for Freenode's DNS. Why does this matter? It seems to be obvious to Lee why this is problematic, but it's not at all obvious to me.

Subtextually: there's the additional problem of "what the hell does it mean to own an IRC network?" Neither Lee nor his company appear to run all the Freenode servers. Those servers are the actual IRC network. It's not that IRC's nature makes it impossible to own a network, but rather just that whatever it is Lee means by "owning" it, the onus is on him to explain it.

This PDF would be better if it stated clearly up top what the problem was, what the competing claim was, and why Lee's claim is right. Then, all these random chat logs should just be supporting appendices.

I'm not saying Lee is wrong about any of this. I'm saying that I do not understand what he is claiming in the first place.

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#207

Post by zokier »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #13

> In 2017, Christel, the former owner of freenode, asked me for assistance with funding and asked me to acquire it. I oblige. Was Christel ever the owner of Freenode? I thought Freenode was anarchically-organised.

That is kinda the problem; anarchically-organised community can not own a domain name, it falls always to some singular entity. And that is where the anarchy broke down when the community realized that they did not own the domain

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#208

Post by neilv »

lonjil wrote: post #195
neilv wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't unravel it in a 10-minute skim, over lunch just now. I speculate that one of the causes of this confusion (which is eerily familiar, from countless other disputes in community projects) is that people involved in community project disputes tend not enlist professional communicators to represent their perspective, and the disputes don't tend to be covered by investigative journalists. And outsiders just are…

Freenode doesn't have any sort of non-profit. Freenode Ltd was created much later and only for organising Freenode Live. Libera.Chat does have a non-profit, however, according to the announcement.

Looks like this PDPC charity might've been what lilo ended up doing to try to make Freenode sustainable (though my guess is that it didn't "own" Freenode)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Peer-Directed_Project...

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#209

Post by ve55 »

wut42 wrote: post #122

Besides discussing what happened, I wonder what IS going to happen. Right now every staffer introduced by rasengan isn't known by much, seems to be very new to freenode (and even at some times, struggling with managing the services). Some of the new staffers seems to be previous operators of Rizon[1], also known as the 4chan of IRC, which is a dubious move. One of them also seems to have been fired from it[2]. On "Fr…

Worth noting that the Rizon-related tweet that you cited is most definitely false and zero opers have moved or been added that match that criterion recently.

Re: “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

#210

Post by pedrocr »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #202
pedrocr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the former staff believe he only owns the name, trademark, and potentially the website/domain That's my reading too but apparently the staff did hand over the network on their way out. So now freenode is apparently actually consolidated into the Freenode Limited company with both the name/DNS/trademark and the network itself. The legal situation behind those moves is not public and is probably the only thing left t…

It just goes back to my point, though, what is "the network" and what can any one person or group of people hand over? The ssh keys to the servers? Sure, but that doesn't mean freenode ltd now owns the servers or the software running on them. They've just been given operational control over them (which I guess is exactly what Andrew wanted at the end of the day) but who exactly owns "the network" if that's even possi…

I'd say that if you control both the DNS and own the network data (chanserv/nickserv/etc) you own the network. You can at any point stand up an entirely different infrastructure, staffed by entirely different people, switch over to it and the users just migrate over as they reconnect. It would look like a really bad net split that doesn't resolve without reconnecting. The splintering network can just advertise a new DNS and fork the network although legally they may not have a claim on the data.

In this case it seems the DNS might have been sold in rather murky circumstances a while ago although the technical control of the DNS was not handed over. That seems to be the DNS change that was the focal point for the current crisis, when, presumably under legal threat, the staff handed that over.

The network data doesn't seem to have been explicitly owned by anyone. The volunteers managed the servers donated by other entities. In a court it would probably be really hard to figure out who owned that data given the lack of an entity the users where agreeing to a ToS with. But now the Freenod Limited company does control everything at least technically. If there was a hostile takeover it was that one. The staff apparently didn't think they could just take a backup of the data and move it over to the new network either. Maybe they've conceded they didn't have a claim on that data or they were cautious for legal reasons.

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