An IRC network without its users is worth nothing though. Anyone can trivially spin up a new IRC network for the cost of a domain name and a VM to host it on. The hard part is getting anyone to care (and thus to use it).
If you run FreeNode into the ground and cause all the users to flee, there's nothing left, just a name with negative brand value (like Enron).
Obviously bullshit, freenode is older than your company, and when it was founded you were not even known. The IRC network freenode was ran by, managed by, developed by and loved by volunteers. You came in like a wrecking ball and destroyed it.
Thank you, self-proclaimed saviour of IRC, for your continuing efforts in destroying it. Fortunately money doesn't buy you communities and doesn't buy you people, so compared to some proprietary solutions and companies, we can and will survive. Your freshly acquired toy, on the other hand, probably won't.
Well. That's a good sign that whoever bought out freenode has no comprehension of group psychology or the fact that this behavior is more likely to lead to people leaving very rapidly. Barbara Streisand syndrome anyone?
It is so clear that they thing the community owes them something when in reality the people who use the irc are the only reason freenode has any value. It's not that hard to spin up another irc server, it is hard as heck to get lots of people to join and use it.
Following this story has prompted a few questions, figured some HN users would have the background to fill it in.
What is the value in owning Freenode IRC?
What is Andrew Lee trying to achieve here?
From the outset, the most likely outcome seems to the one occurring. Disruption of the existing organisation following by splintering of the user base and forever declining relevance of the organisation.
But unless that was the goal, I'm confused as to why.
People forget that IRC works like any other product: at the end of the day, someone "owns" the customer (in the sense of having the strongest relationship with them).
In this case, it's pretty clear it isn't freenode.
The actual relationship is owned by the OSS projects and their teams. If they kill the freenode link as an official channel, people shrug and use the new link.
The entire calculus on freenode's side seems to be stuck in the 1990s.
This doesn't kill IRC. The name isn't important. It's just a brand.
If the Freenode volunteers and users move to Libera Chat, then Libera Chat becomes the new Freenode.
Oracle didn't kill Continuous Integration when they bought and destroyed the Hudson project. All the volunteers moved to the forked Jenkins project, the users followed. Jenkins is now the new Hudson.
Like Oracle, Andrew and Co. will end up holding the bag on a dead brand as the project moves elsewhere.
Yes. Freenode was the largest public IRC relay network, something like 30 servers, 80k+ users, 40k+ channels, originally directed to open source software but e.g. I would mostly hang out on ##math and ##physics and help students out with problems. This is not a "back in the day" situation, like, it continues to be extremely popular as far as non-Web non-Email internet usage goes.
As for the situation, if I understand correctly:
- Andrew Lee unexpectedly transferred control of the domain names without telling the community of maintainers who actually volunteer, unpaid, to keep the relay servers running.
- The maintainers perceived the company that now held the domain names as "sketchy." Andrew is the director of the company but it looked like its corporate filing status was out-of-date or something.
- In a damage control chat, Lee explained that the domain names were transferred because someone at the sketchy company had a plan to "decentralize ownership of the domain name" (which sounds kind of ridiculous up-front?). Lee also made references to proposals he'd never proposed to those folks which documented the transfer, and other such things... there was apparently also some reference to Freenode costing "millions of dollars" which the maintainers did not appreciate -- responses with the emotional tone of "you mean our donated compute and time that we don't get paid for is costing you millions? how?? and if not, how dare you complain that the main burden is on you rather than on us?"
- And part of the problem is that Lee isn't, you know, a peer of these volunteers running his own Freenode server and having conversations with them on a daily basis, so he came across as a domineering outsider.
For these reasons it looks like the volunteers have basically decided to flee the one domain name and start up a separate one, in the hopes that the users get the message and head on over to the new domain.
If your analysis centers on 'servers', I think you're missing the point of concerns about describing an "IRC network" as being "purchased", and other aspects that make some Freenode channels interesting.
Fair enough. I'd say these channel takeover shenanigans disqualify freenode from being a good candidate for a software project's home or HQ. It makes me doubt that any IRC network can be rightly considered for that role, if this is what such network operators can do to it. It's a security risk.
If there aren't technical security assurances against such interference (I think this is just the facts of IRC) perhaps there is a cultural norm against it (judging from the reaction, seems there is) and IRC networks with reputations for holding to those norms. So some other network might be acceptable to use.
Still, better for software project to have its own website as HQ. Then they can have an SSL cert.
There's a volunteer community called freenode, an IRC network called freenode, and a private company called freenode, and nobody seems to be able to agree on who owns what.
my first thought on that post actually was, how about moving all the channels onto freenode? there is no need for every community to maintain their own servers. and most FOSS IRC users will be on freenode anyways.
Wow, they really think they own the communities just because people chose to use them for IRC? How fucking entitled and arrogant. I don't even use it, but death to Freenode. Obviously somebody thought they found a gold mine, but in their tunnel vision is so focused on "owning" something that they never owned, that they're willing to burn the whole place down to keep "owning" it.
If this leads to a mass exodus from Freenode, it'll probably significantly reduce overall IRC usage.
Communities will fracture, people will set up random splinter networks that will die off in a few months, and lots of open-source projects that already want to be using something Javascripty like Slack or Discord are going to use this as the motivating thing to make the switch.
Personally I'm staying put on Freenode because I don't see a lot of user-facing impact potential here, and IRC was already essentially untrusted/public (yes, even your private messages - you don't really know who is relaying them and how trustworthy they are).
As a freenode user I have no say over who the freenode owner is, much like I have no say over Discord's moderation policies. It's the same puppet with different masters; neither situation really empowers me. Yes I can always start my own IRC server but if nobody wants to join it what's the point? 99% of the battle is getting people into the same virtual room.
If you run FreeNode into the ground and cause all the users to flee, there's nothing left, just a name with negative brand value (like Enron).
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