Can someone fill me in on what happened with freenode?
reddit / irc

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ghost-jaguar · 2023-10-06 01:34

I used irc a while back, but stopped after switching jobs/machines
etc. I wanna get back to that sweet sweet hangman channel which I
understand has probably moved to Libera chat. Can someone explain what
happened with freenode? They were taken over by Korea?!? There’s
obviously threads/info but I would love a coherent story or
explanation if possible. Just curious about the drama I missed.

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NeedAGoodUsername · 2023-10-06 03:08

It's a bit complicated, but to sum it up:

* In 2017 the head of staff, 'Christel' formed a company, Freenode
Limited, and transfered ownership of this company to Andrew Lee.
  * Andrew Lee is a Korean-American entrepreneur, founded Private
Internet Access.
  * He claims to be the Crown Prince of Korea, because he claims to be
distantly related to a very old king. [Read this for
more](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27494790).
* Freenode staff were not told about the specifics of this deal, but
were told it wouldn't effect day-to-day operations.
* In May 2021, 14 staff members resigned due to a 'hostile takeover'
by Andrew.
* Christel resigned. Tomaw became head of staff.
* Tomaw wrote a blog post. Freenode staff say Andrew removed it.
  * Shane Allen (Andrew's associate) made statements that they would
be promoted to a staff member, and recruiting others for staff.
  * Shane also offered Ariadne Conill (the Alpine Linux security team
chair) donations if she supported Andrew's claim.
* Andrew promoted a new person to oversee infrastructure and published
comments accusing staff of making Christel resign.
  * Many freenode staffers resigned. Some published statements, which
you can find online that will explain things in more detail than I am.
  * Some staffers accused Andrew of putting legal pressure on Tomaw.
  * Andrew denied this claim, saying he had given freenode "millions
of dollars". He also claimed that he is entitled to Freenode's servers
as he was the owner of the company Freenode Limited.
* Ex-staff formed a new network, Libera Chat.
* Many projects left freenode and joined Libera Chat.
* 'Freenode' took control of channels that had, or intended to move,
citing "inappropriate advertising".
* Freenode had been running on ircd-seven and using Atheme services.
On 14th June 2021, this was switched to using InspIRCd and Anope
services.
  * They did not migrate any data over. Everything prior to this was
lost.
* Freenode now exists as a shell of its former self.

This is a shortened version of [the history section from freenode's
Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_ch
ange_and_conflict), which includes references to the things I've
mentioned above.

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KindOne · 2023-10-06 03:10

tl;dr The network was secretly “sold”. When this became public
knowledge all hell broke loose.


This documents it:

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409

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ghost-jaguar · 2023-10-06 19:31

Thank you both for the story outline and resources! Juicy shit

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BRUT_me · 2023-10-07 05:51

I never liked freenode, but when the incident happen, idiots from
libera spammed my IRC server so I had to block all direct access to my
IRC server except Slovakia and Czechia to make it stop, it is blocked
till now, of course web client works from all over the world, but this
is not interesting for spammers