“Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by hluska » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

rasengan wrote: post #137

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…

Probably would not be wise to guess or speculate and instead go by what I have actually said. The issue with services was because the previous team pulled our mail server and all its contents. We had to abruptly get everything in place. As for the decentralizing - that’s what I’m into and the way to do it on irc is by ending reliance on a central domain name for the connection. It’s not decided yet but is something I…

It sounds to me like you killed a network but you're not mature enough to admit it so now you're grasping at straws in a futile attempt to look like a victim.

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

#182

Post by Macha » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #167

fastball wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's exactly the problem: Lee was being a custodian in the background. Tomaw or whomever decides they want control, so starts spreading falsehoods about interactions with Lee / Lee's intentions. Because Lee is so hands off, these falsehoods gain a lot of traction before Lee is aware of them / can do anything about them and now we're here. Not saying this is the reality, but it doesn't seem far-fetched given t…

> "Lee wants to takeover freenode" (the entity he already owned for years) This is a thing that is confusing, because I've seen some claims that there are in fact two entities operating under the name "freenode": the IRC network itself, which is a federated collective owned by nobody, and Freenode Ltd, a company that basically just exists to register the domains and hold the trademarks, which passed from Chris to Lee…

I don't think tomaw had any interest in control over the limited company, but did want to exclude the limited company from control of the network.

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

#183

Post by josefx » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

logical_person wrote: post #67

duckfang wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. Confidentiality, NDA's, and other business tools like it are at complete odds with open source, free software, transparency, and honesty. It's comments like this that cement the idea of getting off of Freenode to Libera.chat is the best thing we could do.

To say business tools and confidentiality are at odds with open source is comical at best. Some of us work on FOSS as a career. We still have to sign NDAs with customers, we still upstream patches to core components. Throwing your toys out of the ring because business is business is why open source has a funding problem.

One of the companies I worked for tried to avoid NDAs whenever it could. They were apparently full of retarded requirements like giving the customer full access to all of our systems for security review on demand, which of course is at odds with every other NDA requiring us not to share the information on those systems.

I am not sure how lawyers can write these requirements without noticing how impossible they are. Then again I had to can a project that was signed of by the lawyers of at least three different companies, the software licenses involved made it impossible to build a commercial or open source project from it (GPL, AGPL and at least two conflicting commercial ones). So it might just be that they have as much understanding of technology as I have of Chinese.

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

#184

Post by pedrocr » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #103

logical_person wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the formation of Christel's corporation did effectively make her* the owner. any court would see a service she is involved in operating by his company's trademark, as belonging to that company. sad.

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 to be known.

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

#185

Post by blibble » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

antimba wrote: post #143

In the end, it seems what happened is that christel sparked a huge misunderstanding between freenode staff and Andrew Lee by making misleading statements to both parties and lying to hide the fact that she had sold freenode to get herself out of financial troubles.

yes, this seems to be the summary of the entire affair

Lee thinks that he legitimately purchased Freenode, and is understandably going after his asset

and the staff have a difference of opinion

meanwhile christel seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth

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

#186

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

gerikson wrote: post #115

synergy20 wrote: post #28

After reading both sides these days, somehow I feel Andrew is more trust-able and reasonable. I will stay with freenode.

I don't trust Lee, but I'm staying on Freenode too. I have an acccount on Libera. Decentralization is great.

decentralization may be great. permanent netsplits, not so much.

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

#187

Post by rasengan » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

danieldle wrote: post #177

rasengan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freenode > 1m

freenode didn't use 1m in the whole 20 years it existed. Infrastructure: all sponsored Staffers: all volunteers Development: all FOSS Third party services like GitHub: all sponsored so what exactly would it have used > 1m on, please?

This is not true. As a single example, conferences cost money to throw - significant money. We did two.

The FOSS community loves these events to be clear.

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

#188

Post by hannasanarion » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

rasengan wrote: post #134

jgilias wrote: post #131

Interestingly, I don't really see any 'other side' of the story here. It's the same story: 1. Christel sells 'something' to Andrew while under apparent financial distress. 2. Tomaw somehow learns that Andrew is willing to take over operational matters and tries to act against it. 3. Andrew keeps pushing his authority using titles such as 'Board of Freenode' and 'Chairman of Freenode'. 4. Volunteers actually running F…

#2 is very false

If you had no plans to take over operations, then what was your argument about decentralization, and what was your "plan forward" that you spent "considerable time preparing"?

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

#189

Post by scrps » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #176

danieldle wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that you are spreading your falsehoods here, too. The issue with services was not due to the "previous team", but rather due to the sponsor pulling their box. The "previous team" had no access to them by that point. As you might have guessed, the sponsors had a gentlemen's agreement with previous staff and not with Freenode ltd. Now most of them obviously don't like sponsoring their boxes for your company, so t…

Leaving a project when you know that it will cause their infrastructure to collapse isn’t too professional. It seems pretty fair to characterize this as partly your fault, since, y’know, you caused it by leaving. I think both sides in this are acting bizarre. You’re talking like it’s an oath of allegiance rather than an irc server.

OP stated the sponsor pulled the box after they no longer wanted to support freenode. How would the former staff have handled that more professionally? Begging the sponsor not revoke access?

If I were a sponsor who found out a project I was donating resources to was taken over under questionable circumstances by someone with deep pockets I'd have done the same.

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

#190

Post by pandem » Fri, May 21, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

rasengan wrote: post #164

vore wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I daresay your patronizing tone is hardly helping your case.

That’s a personal message to tptacek who has a history of replying to my comments.

As the CEO do you happen to know where I can send a GDPR request? I tried policy@freenode.net which was mentioned on the website but it is not working.

Address not found Your message wasn't delivered to policy@freenode.net because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.