[Update: Hostile takeover of Gentoo, others] Freenode Staff quit en-masse after secret ownership changes

[rcmaehl]

Update: Credit @HarryNyquist

Linux Distro Gentoo and Mobile OS GrapheneOS have both reported to have their channels forcibly taken from them by the new staff:

 

Quote

Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode. Please note that at this point the only official Gentoo IRC channels, as well as developer accounts, can be found on Libera Chat.

 

Summary

Freenode staff have quit en-masse after the owners of the holding company took over the network.

 

Quotes

Quote

Staff at the freenode IRC network have resigned en-masse after control of it passed. Resignation letters piled up from Fuchs, Ed Kellett, Emīls Piņķis, Jessica Sophie Porter and others, capping weeks of drama in the FOSS world's biggest chatbox. Aaron Jones details the sequence of events and concludes that "a hostile entity is now in operational control over the network, and is in posession [sic] of your data." Svante Bengtson, puts it succinctly: During the past few months in general, and last weeks in particular, it has become increasingly clear that the owners of the holding company freenode Ltd have been planning a hostile takeover of the freenode network. That takeover is now about to happen, and I cannot in good faith volunteer for this "new" freenode. freenode Ltd's current owners' values do not align with the values freenode the network was founded on and operated under up until now.  Marco d'Itri, puts it in still-blunter terms: "To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin." The new owner's side of the story, which describes an ongoing battle for control: Given the millions I have injected into freenode thus far, the fact I own it and the fact that I protected the freenode staff with professional legal work and funding when they needed help and they could still lie and slander like this… says a lot about who they are. It saddens me that christel was forced out, and I wish she'd feel safe returning. I'm frustrated that tomaw's hostile takeover seems likely to succeed, in spite of all. I simply want freenode to keep on being a great IRC network, and to support it financially and legally as I have for a long time now. A number of those resigning have established a new IRC network, libera.chat.

 

My thoughts

While this won't matter for a lot of younger folks, those who grew up in the early years of the internet remember IRC as one of the early mediums for chat. It is a shame to see such drama in the community, but it's understandable considering the network was sold out from underneath them.

 

Sources

BoingBoing (quote source)

Boft.it

[thechinchinsong]

Whatever messy situation that's going on, I wish the best for those who resigned and those who are working on libera.chat.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

Okay kids, 'IRC' is 'Millennial Discord', understand?

[StDragon]

13 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Okay kids, 'IRC' is 'Millennial Discord', understand?

You're too old to know what a BBS is, amiright?

[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 minute ago, StDragon said:

You're too old to know what a BBS is, amiright?

I know of them but I have no personal experience with a dial up BBS, no.

[rcmaehl]

17 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Okay kids, 'IRC' is 'Millennial Discord', understand?

I have never felt so attacked but 100% accurate

[divito]

I miss IRC.

[Falkentyne]

I remember the old pirate channels like #fairlight where you would get announcements and stuff.  Even Strider was on it before he retired.

 

Pretty sure IRC was bigger with respect to # of users (versus total people online) than Discord ever was (not talking about montiezation).  IRC and Usenet were as important to the internet back then as the WWW.  Back then, everyone was on IRC and everyone used USENET.

[Guyver1]

There was only Quakenet in my mIRC world.

[rcmaehl]

1 minute ago, Guyver1 said:

There was only Quakenet in my mIRC world.

@rcmaehl slaps @Guyver1 around a bit with a large trout

[igsilya]

It's, probably, worth mentioning that the Freenode was taken over by founder of Private Internet Access. 

 

For me as an open source software engineer who uses Freenode almost every day and has public weekly meetings there, the overall situation is scary.  I'm not sure what is actually happened, but all this is very unhealthy at the very least.  Just sent out an email to discuss moving of the primary channel to Libera.Chat.  And we seems to be migrating starting from tomorrow.

 

Some projects already migrated, some are in the middle of discussion.  Some links to resignation statements and moving announcements:

https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461
https://blog.centos.org/2021/05/centos-irc-channels-moving-to-irc-libera-chat/
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-05-19-liberachat/
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2021q2/006888.html

[RicenShine]

18 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Okay kids, 'IRC' is 'Millennial Discord', understand?

But without calls, videos, markdown, maybe not even emoji.

You, text and emotionless screen

[RicenShine]

Also what exactly was Usenet every info around it is so vague.

BBS is still in some places like inkscape, notpron, indie video game devs
 etc. etc.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

13 minutes ago, RicenShine said:

Also what exactly was Usenet every info around it is so vague.

Usenet is still operational.  Though instead of being used for messaging it's now used for high speed automated piracy.

[WolframaticAlpha]

38 minutes ago, RicenShine said:

Also what exactly was Usenet every info around it is so vague.

Basically a massIve BBS masquerading as a newsletter or reddit of the 80's

19 hours ago, StDragon said:

You're too old to know what a BBS is, amiright?

You're too old to know of a time when modems were only sold by att to the military, amirite?

 

 

 

 

[Spindel]

3 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

You're too old to know of a time when modems were only sold by att to the military, amirite?

 

 

 

 

I’m to young to have used one but I have seen those old modems where you put the phone in IRL..

[WolframaticAlpha]

12 minutes ago, Spindel said:

I’m to young to have used one but I have seen those old modems where you put the phone in IRL..

my parents still used that modem until 2 years ago

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, RicenShine said:

But without calls, videos, markdown, maybe not even emoji.

yeah, it was simpler, and that made it better in some ways, you also didnt have people constantly misinterpreting things because "its hard to convey emotions over the internet" the stuff used ("text emojis") was a lot more distinct.

 

And people were a lot more careful about simply making stuff up because  in a way it was also easier to call them out on their bs and trolls didnt already have figured out a million ways to play the "victim card".

 

Btw, I never used "usenet" but similar early forms of internet communication (we used to call it "chat")

 

[StDragon]

56 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

You're too old to know of a time when modems were only sold by att to the military, amirite?

No, not that old, and I'm not sure about the whole military exclusive thing (at least in America).

 

My dialup BBS days goes back to the 14.4K US Robotics modem.

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 minutes ago, StDragon said:

No, not that old, and I'm not sure about the whole military exclusive thing (at least in America).

 

My dialup BBS days goes back to the 14.4K US Robotics modem.

Not military exclusive. They were just so phreaking(geddit?) expensive due to the monopoly of the AT&T.

 

 

My days went back to a 56k modem. I used to hang around on the BASIC usenet group and some irc chatrooms. I still remember being blown off by chatzilla, bitchx and erc(the emacs irc client)

[StDragon]

10 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

I used to hang around on the BASIC usenet group and some irc chatrooms. I still remember being blown off by chatzilla, bitchx and erc(the emacs irc client)

I would dial into BBS's such as the ones hosted by the Renegade platform. Door / MUD games, downloads, chat, etc.

You can still host from a Windows machine via Synchronet, but it's a kludge last I looked. Maybe there's a newer platform for BBS hosting? I wouldn't mind starting another and connecting via SSH. 

[suicidalfranco]

6 hours ago, RicenShine said:

But without calls, videos, markdown, maybe not even emoji.

You, text and emotionless screen

Much better imo.

Can we go back to that? Specially the no emoji, no stickers part

[Heliian]

On 5/19/2021 at 2:14 PM, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Okay kids, 'IRC' is 'Millennial Discord', understand?

LOL, 'Gen x discord', you get Myspace. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

2 minutes ago, Heliian said:

LOL, 'Gen x discord', you get Myspace. 

My LIVE JOURNAL is offended.

[RicenShine]

@suicidalfranco
@Mark Kaine

 While there is a certain charm to text only systems, IRC's biggest pains was logging in, saving stuff, catching up later. It honestly feels like one of the worst accessibility nightmare. With everything being command line and there is no indication on how to sign up, how to login, how to change nick(all of which the client maker could have implemented but none did), it's simply unusable at it's current stage