What the heck is IRC?
IRC is basically a bunch of chat rooms. Freenode is was a popular IRC network for open source projects to discuss issues and bugs for free.
What’s going on with Freenode?
Holy cow! So Freenode just shot itself in the foot. Recently it was taken over by Andrew Lee (rasengan), and hilarity ensued. Visit the links below to get caught up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628
https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c1646791c61953
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409/
https://boingboing.net/2021/05/19/freenode-irc-staff-quit-after-new-owner-seizes-control.html
Check out their latest blog post (STOP LEAVING! LOL)
They recently enacted a policy that nobody is allowed to advertise Libera.Chat, and then they go and literally take over channels, force redirect to their unofficial namespace, and remove access for the existing channel owners.
This policy, at the time of this blog post, does not exist, though channels owners and users are expected to abide by it.
Also, come join Libera.Chat!
Project Moves
Several FOSS projects have already made their positions quite clear:
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PostgreSQL (libera)
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Perl (libera)
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clim (lisp) (libera)
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Prolog (libera)
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Wesnoth (libera)
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bootstrap (libera)
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Selenium (libera)
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CentOS (libera)
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Wikimedia (libera)
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Haiku (oftc)
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curl (libera)
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OmniOS (libera)
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Arch Linux (libera)
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Django (libera)
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WeeChat (libera)
- FreeBSD (freenode with libera as a contingency)
Here’s the list of channels which had advertised Libera in any way (before the new policy went into effect), 720 channels
Here’s the list of channels which had advertised Libera in any way (4 hours later), 196 channels