Freenode admins resign after ‘acquisition’ and create libera.chat
Many administrators of the popular IRC network Freenode have resigned after what they see as a hostile takeover of the network by Andrew Lee’s company Freenode Limited. In a notification, they advise everyone to switch to libera.chat.
Freenode’s volunteer administrators announced in droves last week that they would stop working, threatening the survival of the popular IRC network. The exodus can be traced back to attempts by Freenode Ltd to take control of the network, they say. Some even speak of a takeover by a ‘malicious party’, as a result of which data can no longer be regarded as safe.
The controversy originated in 2017, when the then-head of the trustees, Christel Dahlskjaer, or christel, transferred Freenode business to the previously established company Freenode Ltd and sold it to Andrew Lee’s Private Internet Access. The substantiation was that this was organizationally necessary and that Private Internet Access could sponsor events. Neither the company nor Lee would gain any further influence, was the promise.
In March of this year, Christel left after a fuss about another commercial deal and the administrators appointed Tomaw as the new leader. Then Lee started to get involved in the day-to-day business and it turned out that Freenode Ltd had gotten a lot more into their hands than the administrators suspected. The company appears to own the domains and all metadata related to NickServ and ChanServ registrations, as well as MemoServ memos and ProjectServ metadata, among other things. Many administrators have now moved away from Freenode and are now focusing on libera.chat, which they see as the successor to Freenode.
Lee himself claims that Christel was kicked out by Tomaw and others, and that she was constantly attacked by his ‘team’. He declares that he is the rightful owner of Freenode. “Given the millions I’ve put into Freenode so far, the fact that I own it, and the fact that I’ve legally protected and funded Freenode’s administrators when they needed help, it says a lot about them that they now lie and slander me.” Lee is the founder of Private Internet Access but sold the VPN company in 2019 for 115 million euros to the security company Kape Technologies.