The status of freenode (the IRC network used by KDE)

[Christian]

Dear KDE community, 

KDE has been using the free services of the freenode IRC networks for a little 
bit more than two decades, and hopefully happily and successfully so. 

During the last few weeks, freenode was a bit in troubled waters due to what 
was perceived as a potential serious threat of a takeover of  the network 
Due to that, a good amount of us who have been building and running freenode 
for the past decades prepared their resignation letters. 
Some of these got leaked a few days and made it to the hackernews frontpage 
and various other sites. The leaks included a personal draft of a resignation 
letter. 

Due to this leakage, Andrew Lee (former PIA/LTM, now shells.com)
learned of the new situation and asked democratically elected
freenode volunteers to step down from their position, as seen in the 
logs linked on [4] [5] [6]
Therefore making the takover attempt and some details public.
 
Included in these logs are also logs from third party users that show 
that associates from Mr Lee, namely the user rdv / nirvana, contacted 
various people and offered them oper access on the new network 
for money or revenge. It sickens me to the stomach to see our community 
that we built in the last 20 years to be lost to this kind of management. 
As you can imagine, the community was unhappy as well and we got loads
of feedback. Thank you very much, this means a lot to us. We've also seen
channel ops standing up to the potential new management, see e.g. [7]

I tried my very best both to not drag KDE into this situation plus to keep 
the network running as I helped running it for the past 10 years, and to keep 
your data safe in the hands of the volunteers that curated it for decades. 

As you can imagine, this whole mess makes me even less want 
to spend any of my volunteering  time for the potential new management, 
and I wouldn't want to be responsible for sensitive user data under that 
management, either. 

Therefore I resigned from my volunteer position as a freenode staffer, along 
with some colleagues, and I assume a lot more will follow.
I had all my access removed, so that I could not hand
it or any data over to a third party, even if I wanted or if I were forced to.

My resignation letter, along with some details, can be found at
https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt


Big thanks to the KDE community for having been with us for more than twenty 
years, and despite IRCs shortcomings and new solutions available still being 
part of the freenode IRC network. 

Kind regards, 

Christian  (commonly known as Fuchs)