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freenode-resign.txt
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Dear freenode users and projects, | |
I joined freenode staff a bit more than 10 years ago, after having used | |
the network for already roughly 5 years by that time. | |
During this time, I enjoyed supporting our communities in various roles; | |
I met some of you through first level support, | |
through my work for the groups team or due infra work. | |
I still think that freenode as a network is a great idea, | |
and offers projects and groups of any size a possibility to collaborate, | |
coordinate or just chat freely and for free. | |
Since these early times, freenode changed form a couple of times. | |
The whole work was, however, always done by unpaid volunteers | |
that grew into close friends over time. | |
All the servers we have and all the paid services we use | |
were sponsored by either companies or friends and allies. | |
We never wanted to be, never were and never will be a business. | |
A couple of years ago, christel, now former head of freenode staff | |
sold `freenode ltd` (a holding company) to a third party, | |
Andrew Lee[1], under terms that have not been disclosed to the staff body. | |
This was done, from what we were informed, to organize our freenode | |
#live conferences, that required a legal body. | |
We were repeatedly promised, by both christel and Andrew Lee, | |
that neither the holding nor Andrew Lee would have any operational impact | |
on freenode the IRC network. We gladly forwarded this to our users, | |
who were understandably concerned as well. | |
In the past few weeks, this has changed[2], and the existance of a legal threat | |
to freenode has become apparent. We cannot know the substance of this legal | |
threat as it contains some kind of gag order | |
preventing its broader discussion within staff. | |
The democratically elected heads of their respective teams, | |
development, infrastructure, projects and communities | |
were removed by force[3] and have been informed that they are not | |
entitled to act in their respective capacity. | |
As a result, Mr Lee wants and partially has operational control | |
over the freenode IRC network now. | |
This goes against my personal values, beliefs and rules, | |
this goes against what we have been doing for the past 10 years, | |
this goes against our promises to our users and communities. | |
Due to a leak of a personal resignation letter draft, | |
Andrew Lee learned of the situation and asked democratically elected | |
freenode volunteers to step down from their position, as seen in the | |
logs linked on [4] [5] [6] | |
Included in these logs are also logs from third party users that show | |
that associates from Mr Lee, namely the user rdv, contacted | |
various people and offered them oper access on the new network | |
for money or revenge. It sickens me to the stomach to see our community | |
that we built in the last 20 years to be lost to this kind of management. | |
As you can imagine, the community was unhappy as well and we got loads | |
of feedback. Thank you very much, this means a lot to us. We've also seen | |
channel ops standing up to the potential new management, see e.g. [7] | |
This really means a lot to us, but unfortunately reality sometimes looks | |
different, especially when lawyers and potential lawsuits were involved. | |
A contract in which christel, former head of staff, allegedly sold freenode, surfaced. | |
And while I personally think that this would have neither included any servers | |
or code or user data, since that did not belong to christel to sell, I am not a lawyer | |
and apparently some of our volunteers got pressured very hard and their personal life | |
could have been ruined easily should we have fought against this apparent contract. | |
As you can imagine, this kind of proceeding makes me even less want | |
to spend any of my volunteering time for the potential new management, | |
and I wouldn't want to be responsible for sensitive user data under that management, either. | |
Therefore I, along with my colleagues, resigned from my volunteer position | |
as a freenode staffer. I had all my access removed, so that I could not hand | |
it or any data over to a third party, even if I wanted or if I were forced to. | |
-- | |
Where will we be going from here? | |
We are founding a new network with the same goals and ambitions: libera.chat. | |
It is backed by a swedish non-profit which lets us hold the name, | |
domain and various other assets to avoid a hostile corporate takeover. | |
It allows us to continue to operate the network as unpaid, neutral volunteers. | |
It allows us to ensure that your personal data does not end up as an | |
asset to some company that could consider monetizing it. | |
You can connect to the new network at `irc.libera.chat`, | |
ssl port 6697 (and the usual clearnet port). | |
We're really sorry that it had to come to this. | |
When we told you that freenode ltd. and Andrew Lee / PIA / LTM / ... | |
won't have any impact on freenode, | |
we always communicated based on what we knew and what we were promised. | |
I'm aware that such a move is hard, especially for established communities. | |
We will do our very best to support you if you plan to join us on libera. | |
I hope to see the lot of you on the other side, | |
feel free to contact me on the new network if you have any questions. | |
A big thank you to my former freenode colleagues, all our users, | |
projects and communities that acompanied us for more than a decade. | |
Thank you very much, keep rocking and making the | |
free / open source software and peer directed communities great. | |
Christian (Commonly known as Fuchs) | |
Footnotes | |
[1]: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10308021/officers | |
[2]: A blogpost has been removed without explanation: (via the wayback machine) | |
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode.net/news/freenode-reorg | |
[3]: The teams and their democratically elected heads got removed without explanation: | |
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231451/https://freenode.net/people | |
[4]: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409 | |
[5]: https://paste.sr.ht/blob/4f5c7a6b3f6adb4697572f8cd77582fa16a123de | |
[6]: https://paste.sr.ht/~ircwright/7e751d2162e4eb27cba25f6f8893c1f38930f7c4 | |
[7]: https://gist.github.com/shadowcat-mst/998cea12794768bdb3da2daeff31baad#file-on-freenode-s-independence | |
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