And Christel Dahlskjaer was (still is, the CCO) an employee of Lee's company, Private Internet Access, when she sold Freenode Networks to Freenode Limited.
It wasn't hers to sell, even in her capacity of head of Freenode Staff at the time.
the thing is, IMO, that once Christel shut down the PDPC (the entity behind freenode a long time ago), Freenode just became "Christel" owned. And Christel sold everything under shady reasons (without really saying everything was sold) to Lee.
Some resignations letters say that it seems to say this.
Christel Dahlskjaer, the former head of Freenode's staff who transferred her interest in Freenode Limited to Lee, resigned in March. Dahlskjaer, with the help of Richard “RichiH” Hartmann, took over Freenode after project originator Rob Levin (lilo) died in a traffic accident in 2006 and Levin’s brother tried to turn the project into business. She was an employee of PIA at the time of the Freenode Limited transaction.
> In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer—who was, at the time, head of Freenode staff—created a corporation, Freenode Ltd., which she immediately sold to Lee
Dahlskjaer incorporated Freenode Limited in August 2016, contacted Lee about a possible acquisition in March 2017, and finalized the sale in April 2017. That's hardly immediately, and evidence to support Lee's involvement with the incorporation isn't currently public.
> Escalation in April
Before any of these events, Lee's long held access to freenode's DNS account was revoked and requests for that to be reverted were declined, along with threats that staff would quit if the revocation was not honored.
> A week after Lee's effectively public announcement of ownership and de facto dictatorial operation of Freenode, the staffers who resigned from Freenode created Libera.chat as a replacement.
Libera Chat was created April 23rd, before any control was transferred to Lee, 5 days after Fuchs' post and 7 days before the testnet was shutdown. It was only publicly announced on May 19th.
The core of it is simply that the person who was head of Freenode staff at the time (an employee of Lee's, also) sold something to Lee that was not hers to sell. After promises from Lee to not interfere, the staff later found out this was not the case and left to create a new home for the projects hosted on Freenode. Whether those projects move is entirely up to them.
After PDPC, what christel personally owned to transfer to freenode ltd to sell to Andrew Lee is... hard to define. A domain and a website, sure. But christel didn't own the servers, did not employ people, and does not have any agreement with the users, something which continued into freenode ltd. And apart from the users, operators, servers, and domain, it's not clear what an IRC network is to own.
Christel, the previous freenode head of staff, sold freenode to andrew lee (then of PIA). This was downplayed at the time, both publicly and to staff, so this is effectively delayed drama that would have happened in 2017 otherwise.
Christel stepped down, new staff lead shut out Andrew Lee, not realising the depth of his ownership - helped by both Christel and Andrew Lee downplaying it in the past. When it became clear that "Freenode" was owned by Andrew Lee, and not the volunteer run organisation they believed it to be, drama ensued over whether she had the legal right to (probably yes), whether it was morally appropriate to (probably not) and what she actually sold (Freenode runs via volunteer staff on loaned servers, none of which freenode ltd owns or has contracts for, so it basically just owns a domain and a website).
After the legal discussions found that Andrew Lee did legally own whatever freenode itself owned, the staff all quit and formed libera.chat, their own network. Andrew Lee brought in new staff to freenode and some policy changes (notably allowing network ops to reclaim channels that were abandoned as redirects, and toning down the code of conduct portion).
Christel was the head of staff and created a limited corporation in the UK to manage freenode’s name and trademarks. What’s unclear is how much “freenode limited” owns in terms of the network itself.
> In 2017, the then head of staff at Freenode, Christel Dahlskjaer, incorporated it as Freenode Ltd and sold it to Andrew Lee. <...> the incorporation and sale was done just to sponsor a conference.
What a crazy turn of events for such an old project. Thanks for the link.
Christel only legally owned anything of Freenode to sell to Andrew Lee because she took it over in the dissolution of PDPC. If PDPC never legally owned Freenode, it would be owned by... Rob Levin's estate? So I think PDPC did own Freenode in some form.
It wasn't hers to sell, even in her capacity of head of Freenode Staff at the time.
reply