Letter received from tomaw

gistfile1.txt

freenode situation
External

T** ****** <***@****>
Mon, May 10, 10:10 AM (2 days ago)
to me

Hey Andrew.

I’ve now been able to speak to Christel about your lawyer's letter and
to get legal advice on it. I should say that the reason for taking
legal advice was not because I want to have a dispute with you, but
because I simply did not know what to do when I got your letter – I have
no experience with these things personally, having never received
anything like a lawyer’s letter before.

I know you and I both have a deep passion for freenode and have spent
lots of time helping it, using it and trying to ensure that it can grow.
My main aim at the moment is to work with you and ensure the community
and the project in general continues as it has for so long. As I said, I
was quite apprehensive when I received your lawyer's letter but having
had some time to step back a little, think things over and better
understand the situation from your point of view, I think a lot of the
concerns could be better understood by discussion.

I know that you have access to the domain, and I apologise for the fact
that it was inadvertently revoked. This wasn’t, as my lawyers set out in
their letter, a decision that was made, it was simply an error arising
out of the Internet outage last year and we had not realised previously
that your access had been blocked.

Having looked at it from your perspective, I see that it may have looked
as though we were trying to merge the project with OFTC or otherwise
change its nature.  That simply isn’t the case at all. OFTC is
completely separate from freenode, though as you know we collaborate and
share knowledge with the staff there for both our benefits.

With that in mind, would it be helpful for you, Christel, perhaps Neil
and me to sit down on a call and discuss the issues and how we can
resolve them? I reached out to Christel to ask her about her memory of
events, and both of us are very keen to ensure that we can all work
together to resolve the dispute quickly and move forward with the
project.

Let me know what you think.

Tom.

--
T** ****** <***@****>

Hey Andrew,

Please don't listen to Tom Wesley. He's been slowly eating Freenode for over a decade, using his influence at OFTC to infiltrate Freenode staff and corrupt it with his presence. He's been trying to make it hard for me to tell my story. Tom (and frankly most the people that left) are some of the most toxic people in the open source community with years, and years of abusive behaviour stacked up behind them -- they lie about the people they target to discredit them and there are alot of us. I am one of them. They have internalized a culture that finds this type of thing entertaining, and the best thing that can happen for the open source community is to replace them with better staff that will faciliate an open environment where people can communicate on technical projects.

Less than 48 hours in, Libera network operators re-implemented their dystopian policies and are driving whole communities away with their toxic behaviours.

Please continue what you're doing; I highly respect it, find it long overdue, and the community desperately needs this. Don't let them come back. We don't want them.

If there's anything I can do to help, including funding, please let me know. They have built their own toxic administrator paradise somewhere else, and this gives Freenode an oppportunity to recover from their influence.

I want nothing from you other than for you to know that there are people out there cheering you on.

-C