pinkisemils

All things come to an end.

I can't say I played a significant role in freenode, but I tried to do my part as a volunteer staff member, and had some fun along the way. But my involvement with freenode has to end due to what has come to light in these past months. What follows is a badly told story of what happened that made me stop volunteering my time at this network. And let's be clear about that, freenode the IRC network up until now has almost exclusively been ran by unpaid volunteers on donated hardware, sans some machines that were provided by PIA.

A long time ago, in 2016 a holding company for freenode was created, with the purpose of helping us to receive donations from PIA, for things such as freenode live. The head of staff promised that this would never have any impact on the way the network was operated. I was personally somewhat sceptical of the need for a conference for a network such as ours - conferences usually have a specific topic that is of common interest by it's attendees and thought t

shadowcat-mst

It appears that rasengan (Andrew Lee) of Private Internet Access believes that ownership of the company Freenode Ltd. gives him the right to unilaterally replace the current staff team.

We may have had our disagreements with staff, but freenode being run by a volunteer team, using servers provided by sponsors, is a key reason that we appreciate freenode.

As such, we do not believe that such a unilateral replacement by a corporate interest is appropriate.

If this attemped takeover by Andrew Lee continues, we will be advocating to move our communities elsewhere.

Context: Fuchs' leaked (not by him) draft resignation letter that caused Andrew Lee to come onto #freenode: https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt

edk0

IRC friends, enemies and others,

Control of freenode has recently been seized by the proprietors of Freenode Limited, a holding company established by a previous head of freenode and a third party as part of a deal with a corporate sponsor. The terms of that deal were not disclosed, and remain unknown to me.

At the time, we, freenode's volunteer staff, were given informal guarantees that staff retained operational control of the network. The same guarantees were repeated after leadership was passed on to a new head of staff. I don't