Developers of the open source organization Freenode are quitting en masse after Andrew Lee, a tech entrepreneur and the Crown Prince of Korea, has taken control of the network in what developers are describing as an “hostile takeover.”
[…]On Wednesday, a dozen Freenode staff volunteers published posts announcing their resignations, which explain their decision to quit. The broad strokes of the letters explain that they believe Lee bought the entire Freenode network under what they believe are false—but legal—pretenses, and that they have lost control over the network. They said there is little the staff can do to oppose changes that Lee wants to implement.
The now former staff members announced that they are launching a new chat network, Libera.chat, to continue Freenode’s mission.
I did not have this on my 2021 bingo card.
In the spirit of objectivity, it might make sense to share the response from the owner:
https://freenode.net/news/freenode-is-foss
I do not know how much of it is true, but they also seem to have a coherent story. Overall this entire saga probably started from lack of proper communication.
Let us hope it does not devolve any further.
sukru,
There are clearly factual discrepancies in the public statements made by both sides. I’m not privy to any details and am not sure what the truth is. However one fact both sides explicitly agree on is that Andrew Lee got control using lawyers, so one way or another it kind of does give credence to the notion that it was a hostile takeover.
Both sides also agree that Andrew Lee has legal ownership of Freenode Ltd. with legal rights. Without knowing the full truth of the events I don’t think it’s possible to conclude that both sides presented factual discrepancies, much less clearly done so. It sounds to me like Fuchs is upset and learning the hard way what little, if any, authority or legal rights he has over Freenode affairs. He sounds like a disgruntled employee who just realized he’s an intern, or learning that “working” somewhere for a long time doesn’t make you an executive by default. It’s appropriate he and Freenode part ways at this point since he wants to be the one calling the shots. I hope he isn’t relying on all this behind-the-scenes drama to automatically poach everyone over to this new irc network he’s trying to start though.
I too don’t know all the details but I’m not inclined to buy into Fuchs FUD without any actual proof of anything sinister. He said/she said is not proof. I think Freenode will be just fine without Fuchs and his buddy circle occupying irc “staff” positions, which aren’t exactly hard to fill. There’s plenty of good people available to replace them.
friedchicken,
I wasn’t really taking a position about who was right or wrong, only that some of the facts are contradictory like whether Andrew Lee provided freenode’s funding and servers. Regardless, it sounds like freenode was legally transferred to Andrew Lee under the previous head of freenode without notifying anyone else. I can see why people feel pissed off and betrayed, but it is what it is.
> He sounds like a disgruntled employee who just realized he’s an intern, or learning that “working” somewhere for a long time doesn’t make you an executive by default.
In fairness, it’s my understanding the freenode staff were all volunteers and were not paid (other than someone else flipping the hosting bills).
There’s definitely points on both sides, but most open source projects abandoned freenode since most don’t want drama. Servers with an not-for-profit behind them and boards of people to decide direction will sustain the test of time more than a manic ruler.
I have a comment about osnews article formatting: I see now that the sentence has a lot of links embedded into it, but I only discovered this by chance and didn’t catch it the first time since there are no visual cues whatsoever to indicate that different parts of the blue text have different links. I know it’s cool or whatever to remove the link underline style using CSS, but then without the underline format to demarcate the beginning and end of a link it’s really unclear. If such a style is going to be used, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have adjacent links without some kind of breaks. I vote to add in the underlined text, at least as a hover style to make it clear where individual links start & end before clicking. Touch screens make the problem worse with blunt pointing and I don’t think I would have even discovered that there are multiple links using a mobile browser.
AFAIK not a crown prince. A pretender to a throne that doesn’t exist. A _clown_ prince if you like