Somehow I think we're not having the same conversation. It's not that it had to do with use of real names on freenode. It's that it had to do with no formal legal structure for freenode (and a formal legal structure requires real names associated with it).

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.

Freenode was registered under Freenode Limited out of Britain, the head of staff was effectively the president. There was definitely legal structure, voting, etc... People knew Christel's name, the rest of the staffers knew each other's names, it's just not circulated outside of that circle.