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

[Ahmad Samir]

On 19/05/2021 10:34, Christian wrote:
> 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)
> 
> 

Thank you (all of you) for all the hard work over the years, IRC has been always there as far back 
as I can remember :)

And, yes, I hope I'll be seeing you soon on the new, really 
free-we-are-making-sure-of-it-by-backing-it-up-with-a-non-profit-organization, node/network :)

Have a very good day, and thanks again.

(And I didn't know the background of freenode, however I've always thought that it's as amazing as 
having Linux as whole, Kernel, glibc, KDE, and IRC :)).

I second what Bhushan said, we need to act quickly....

-- 
Ahmad Samir