Freenode, an open source IRC network with a history of more than two decades, is undergoing tremendous changes. The former employee stated that "a hostile entity controls Freenode... and controls your data."
In May of this year, the American Korean-American entrepreneur and "Prince of North Korea" Andrew Lee announced the ownership and control of Freenode. However, former employees accused Andrew Lee of "taking away" Freenode through obscure legal procedures, and left one after another to create Freenode's alternative service, Libera Chat. A large number of open source projects have fled Freenode.
Freenode was founded by Rob Levin in 1994. It is an IRC instant chat network used between groups or individuals. All servers can be accessed through the host address chat.freenode.net (permanent link) and irc.freenode.net. Load balancing is performed by connecting actual servers in various places. As of 2010, Freenode has become the largest free and open source software IRC network.
The management and operation of the Freenode project is managed by a small number of volunteers. The team is passionate about free open source software and the peer-directed project community.
However, this open source project with a history of nearly 30 years has recently suffered heavy losses.
Last week, Andrew Lee announced the takeover of Freenode, which directly led to a large number of ex-Freenode staff leaving. They considered this to be a "hostile takeover", although Andrew Lee claimed that these were just "rumors."
Andrew Lee blogged on the Freenode homepage, explaining his takeover of Freenode. But this did not prevent the resignation of a large number of employees, apparently his remarks were not convinced.
In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer, then head of Freenode, founded Freenode Co., Ltd. and immediately sold it to Lee. Dahlskjaer and Lee told Freenode employees and users that the company was established to sponsor a meeting to handle some necessary paperwork, and daily operations will remain unchanged.
Both the staff and developers of Freenode insist that Freenode cannot be sold-the staff are all volunteers, and the infrastructure does not belong to Dahlskjaer.
However, according to Freenode developer Aaron Jones, who has resigned, "Andrew is richer than us, and we can't compete with it." It is reported that Andrew Lee has founded many technology companies and is the founder of VPN service provider PIA.
Although the disputed contract was signed in 2017, employees did not object until this year because Freenode's operations began to change without their control or consent.
New management excessively interfered with Freenode operations, causing dissatisfaction among employees
Things can be traced back to February this year. At that time, Dahlskjaer placed the logo of Shells, a cloud virtual desktop service provider held by Andrew Lee, in a prominent position on the Freenode homepage. This seems irrelevant-free and open source software (FOSS) projects have always accepted sponsorship and advertising. However, the employees responsible for operating Freenode at the time were not notified in advance, and of course they did not approve the arrangement.
One reason for the strong opposition from Freenode employees is Shells CTO Mark Karpelès. Karpelès is the founder of the closed Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which lost nearly 850,000 Bitcoins (currently valued at $33.4 billion) due to an attacker exploiting a huge security breach. A Tokyo court found Karpelès guilty of deliberately falsifying records to cover up various losses in the exchange, even though he was found to have not directly misappropriated public funds.
As Freenode former employee Aaron Jones explained in his long resignation letter, this is not the only problem with this new ad. According to Jones, sponsorship usually only appears on the freenode.net/acknowledgements page, and placing the Shells logo in a prominent position in the upper right corner of the Freenode homepage has deviated from the norm.
Jones said that Dahlskjaer may be unable or unwilling to explain the new advertisement to employees, and instead simply chose to resign. (Lee claimed that Freenode employees "forced" Dahlskjaer to resign, but Jones and other former employees denied this statement.) After that, Freenode employees elected Tom Wesley (tomaw) to replace her.
After Dahlskjaer resigned, things did not ease. Since April 2021, Lee has increased its control over Freenode:
- Freenode employees created a blog outlining the changes in leadership and announced changes to the newly developed back-end ircd software Solanum. Jones claimed that Lee immediately deleted the article and manually edited the website's built-in history to create an illusion that the article never existed.
- In late April, a Freenode test network (used to migrate infrastructure to Solanum) was closed without discussion. Wesley (tomaw) executed the shutdown and refused to explain the reason; Jones and other employees believed that Lee was behind the scenes, threatened Wesley's compliance with legal force, and prevented OFTC staff from speaking out.
- Lee registered the channel #freenode-board without communicating with employees. Jones stated that Lee itself does not have such permissions (only official group contacts are allowed to create channels in Freenode's main namespace, and Lee is not an official Freenode contact).
- Shane Allen (nirvana), an employee of Lee, boasted about his behavior to win tomaw. He also tried to bribe well-known user Ariadne with operating privileges: "I make sure you get +oO permissions so you can kick people. This is my gift to you. "
- On May 11, Lee sent a notice to all employees in the name of the "Board of Directors" and directly to Freenode individual employees. Everything comes from the "board of directors", but Freenode staff said that the company has never had a "board of directors."
- On May 12th, Lee (rasengan) published his description of these events in the Github gist-in which he claimed to have legal ownership of Freenode.
Departed employees established Libera Chat, and several open source projects left Freenode and switched to the new network
A week after Lee publicly announced the ownership of Freenode and the de facto dictatorship, employees who resigned from Freenode created the new network Libera.chat as a replacement for Freenode.
Libera Chat is a Swedish non-profit organization owned and operated by volunteer workers who also have voting rights. The organization has a small board of directors elected by members and currently consists of a chairperson, treasurer, project and community representatives, engineering representatives/vice chairpersons, and operations representatives. But most decisions are made by all members as a whole. The members also elected two auditors to be responsible for auditing the actions of the board of directors on behalf of the members. The organization will publish an annual transparency report detailing the results of the accounts and auditors’ investigations, as well as the board’s standard annual report. At present, all board members and auditors of Libera Chat are former employees of Freenode.
After the departure of Freenode employees, many open source projects chose to leave Freenode. Wikimedia, Ubuntu, Curl, Adafruit, and multiple Linux distributions (Gentoo, CentOS, Alpine Linux) have expressed their intention to leave the Freenode channel and move to other IRC networks, including Freenode Libera Chat created by former employees.
Libera Chat stated that there are currently too many organizations switching to Libera Chat, and there is even a backlog of registrations. The official Twitter account of Libera Chat stated that as of Tuesday, it has more than 16,000 concurrent users and 19,500 registered user accounts. Before the employee outflow last week, Freenode stated that it "has 90,000 users and approximately 50,000 registered channels." According to Richard Hartmann, a former Freenode employee, Libera Chat has become the sixth largest IRC network on the Internet in just 24 hours.
Former Freenode employee kline wrote in a post on the Libera Chat official website: "Free and open source software communities and projects are the core mission of Libera. We look forward to supporting more. By providing them with space for cooperation and coordinated development, support Its users, social, and their teams connect and form lifelong friendships.” He said that Libera Chat entered the top 10 in the world within a few days.
Regarding multiple open source projects leaving Freenode, Andrew Lee stated that this "is the great thing about IRC-it is easy to migrate to another network". He said that unlike other centralized services based on non-public protocols, IRC does not have vendor lock-in issues, and users can choose which network to use.
However, on May 26, kline posted on the Mastodon website, stating that Andrew Lee had taken over more than 700 channels that mentioned libera.chat on Freenode.
For Freenode, an open source IRC network with a history of nearly 30 years, now may be its critical moment.
Reference link:
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-been-taken-over-by-the-crown-prince-of-korea/
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbgvg/major-internet-projects-are-leaving-freenode-after-korean-prince-takeover
- https://mastodon.sdf.org/@kline/106299403921451814
- https://freenode.net/
- https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode
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