The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure... they got away with it.
The comment at the top of this thread was talking about how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that sort of thing happening again before investing energy in this new thing, one would want to know more about the formal legal structure and who is behind it.
The "old internet" way is "We're just some people cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to know each other's real names." That has plusses and minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone else for personal profit, even though all the people informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns out it's hard to stop them.
I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal organization or legal rights that let one person who had enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he owned it.
You want that not to happen again, you might want to do something different. And indeed the announcement acknowledges that, that's why there is "a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended).