191–200 of 307 posts
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So my understanding of the situation (not an insider, just following the drama): 1. Way back when, Freenode was started by Rob Levin/Lilo. At some stage a legal entity needed to exist, which was Open Projects Network initially. 2. After some drama about misappropriation of funds, Freenode staff seperated themselves (all involved then having moved on by the time of the current drama) from OPN. [1] 3. Still realising t…
> So what does it mean to own Freenode?
I think this is the very crux of the issue. Andrew claims to own Freenode in its entirety, even though its not very clear what that means. And that claim apparently rubbed the staff, tomaw in the forefront, in a very wrong way. As far as I can tell, the staff thought that Freenode the network was collectively "owned" if at all, so Andrew waltzing in and claiming singular ownership naturally resulted conflict.
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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.
It wasn't a very nice move by the sponsor to yank support without giving any notice – usually you'd get a week, or 30 days, or something – but it sounds like no one had any obligations to.
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?
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…
Libera.Chat does have a non-profit, however, according to the announcement.
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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.
Or, in the words of Marsellus Wallace: there is no "me and you".
I want my usenet back
It never left you. You left it. It’s sitting there waiting for you to come visit.
with all that i still don't know what freenode is lol
There's a volunteer community called freenode, an IRC network called freenode, and a private company called freenode, and nobody seems to be able to agree on who owns what.
I (the project lead) also used IRC back in the 80s and early 90s.
Here's what IRC is to me (I'm not speaking for everyone involved in Ardour):
* a protocol
* an accessible server
* a channel (or two), with a founder and at least one operator
The only exception to this is when there is (as there was last year or the year before) a coordinate DDOS attack on the servers. In the situation, I do care that the server admins are competent and have the tools to do what needs to be done. In the case of that attack (which IIRC also somehow centered on Christel in some way), the Freenode admins did what needed to be done, and I thank them for it.
The service that Freenode offered the FOSS community was to make those 3 things available at no charge for our projects. This was (and remains) enormously valuable. But nothing else about Freenode is of importance to me. It could be owned by Google as long as those 3 things work in the right way. I prefer to be using an infrastructure maintained by people with some ideological preference that supports the work we do, but realistically speaking, on a day to day basis, it makes no difference. I'm the operator in #ardour, and as long as the network ops stay out, allow me to set channel modes and other policies, their existence is something I can remain almost entirely blissfully ignorant of.
I don't want to have to care about what is happening at Freenode at all. What we get from IRC is completely orthogonal to the beliefs and behaviors of anyone behind the scenes. I'd prefer that it remains that way, but it seems as if everyone behind the scenes is telling me that I'm supposed to care.
(*) anyone imagining that IRC has any degree of privacy doesn't understand IRC. Ergo, whether the servers are in the US, or the EU, or southern Africa makes no difference to the content that I'm willing to read or write on an IRC channel.
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Is it true that they pulled freenode’s mail server? I see lots of emotion here, and emotion is fine. But yanking someone’s existing infrastructure isn’t very nice. If that part isn’t true, though, then someone here is lying.
The mail server was working when the whole staff team resigned. What happened after then will have entirely been within the control of the freenode management, their administration, and their sponsors. Every ex-freenode staffer I have talked to has been exceptionally cautious about damaging the data and systems they tended for literal decades, and to my knowledge none were disrupted. I think here, you have to look to…
Andrew claims they brought a lawyer in after their access to the DNS was revoked and their request for that to be undone was denied. They supposedly have had access for 5 years without issues, and according to Tomaw it's something they'd "probably never do anything with."
Why should Andrew accept that, even if the only thing Freenode Ltd. owned was the domain and name? If they didn't do anything nefarious for 5 years, what changed that made the domain takeover now necessary? Especially since the person taking over the domain apparently admits Andrew wouldn't do anything to it... or was that exchange fabricated?