![]() They searched the network for any channel that had libera in the topic and took it over. The upside of the whole thing is that projects will ensure their new infrastructure are not susceptible to such shenanigans in the future.Īll they literally did, quite literally, was search the network for all channels with "Libera" in the topic and took them over. So rich guy gains control of Freenode through dubious means but doesn't actually grasp that the value of his acquisition depends entirely on maintaining the goodwill of the users, goodwill that is quickly lost when the means of his acquisition are revealed.Īn exodus of the users predictably starts, and true to form the rich guy engages in a heavy handed unethical means of damage control, making the situation even worse. Long story short, rich guy recognizes that Freenode has huge name recognition but no book value, and figures there's a money making opportunity. While group contacts from the channels did not contact freenode staff directly, we were rather surprised when we received reports of unpleasant elements operating in the background and influencing these projects, namespaces and channels with false information in order to harm freenode’s administration and staff members’ images and paint a false narrative altogether. You know things are bad when you can't even make your BS explanation sounds convincing:Īs you are aware, over the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing an increasing amount of spam from other networks intending to mislead and influence long term running projects, namespaces and channels into moving to another new network which was formed parallel to freenode. ![]() "Lastly, there are no excuses for this, and I'm willing to admit that I was wrong with Tuesday's move and apologize for the inconvenience that may have caused." As we move forward I'd like to fully assure you that we will be working in complete commitment to restore projects, namespaces and channels that were closed on accident as a part of this event and we welcome them to use freenode as before as their very own homebase. "We believe we should have done this in a much more communicative way to circulate the right message and keep things transparent which of course did not happen. Since certain projects were disrupting their users' ability to chat on freenode via mass kicks, force closures, spam, we decided to enact this policy in those places which were deemed in violation and could cause an issue later. "The intent of doing this was not an attempt of a hostile takeover nor hijack like many people are saying. Wednesday Freenode owner Andrew Lee posted a blog post explaining that "in retrospect, we should have handled the action of closing down channels slightly differently." "All told, it appears something like 700 channels have been seized and re-permissioned," reports The Register, "supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy." For this reason Ubuntu's replacement network, libera.chat has a more clearly open organisational structure than Freenode had before being taken over. With IRC channels often used for important system advice, and project communication, this becomes not just an inconvenience but even a security problem. įor Ubuntu, and many other FOSS projects, Freenode has long been one of the major official forms of communication. The move follows a "hostile takeover" of Ubuntu's namespace by Freenode's new management that appears to be happening to many other distributions including Gentoo as well as other projects that have used Freenode. Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Ubuntu has announced that, with immediate effect Ubuntu's IRC channels are moving to libera.chat.
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