What are the terms of the confidentiality agreement? Who would need to sign off on terminating the confidentiality agreement, and would you consider doing so in order to help the public understand what's going on?

About the majority of the questions I will get back to you. In terms of the latter - I wish I could have simply posted it — so absolutely, yes.

Thanks. I'm glad to hear that -- I think the lack of transparency around the sale is making it hard for a lot of people (myself included) to make sense of this whole situation.

so you're willing to disclose it?

I'm sure the other side would also be open to it

if both sides are happy there should be no problem whatsoever

this would completely settle the debate

The other side might be christel, not the libera.chat ops.

I think it's just Christel needed money and this guy took advantage and no one or almost no one with admin/operational duties was informed. So I think the legality of this transaction was dubious.

But, I don't think it matters that much anymore. People just need to get the word out that the network has a new name.

so... she told Andrew that he now is the owner of freenode, whilst simultaneously telling the staff that he wasn't?

whilst Andrew paid her (seemingly in exchange for ownership)

not a bad deal for her... if that's a correct assessment then it certainly looks like that could be considered to be fraud

Yeah I've come to the same conclusion but idk why the staff didn't say this in the first place. They only said that they didn't know he was the owner.

Oof.

Confidentiality, NDA's, and other business tools like it are at complete odds with open source, free software, transparency, and honesty.

It's comments like this that cement the idea of getting off of Freenode to Libera.chat is the best thing we could do.

To say business tools and confidentiality are at odds with open source is comical at best. Some of us work on FOSS as a career. We still have to sign NDAs with customers, we still upstream patches to core components.

Throwing your toys out of the ring because business is business is why open source has a funding problem.

Why the heck would a IRC network, run by volunteer, with infra graciously provided by sponsors, have to sign NDAs with anyone? Everything about Freenode should have been transparent.

> To say business tools and confidentiality are at odds with open source is comical at best. Some of us work on FOSS as a career. We still have to sign NDAs with customers, we still upstream patches to core components.

It makes sense that credentials to services are confidential. But aside that, the whole point behind a bulk of free software and open source is that everything's done out in the open. You get to watch the meat grinder - and you can even operate it as well! The head butcher may have exacting quality controls, but again - its viewable.

And yes, many of us have NDA's. I have a few myself, only on the specific implementations of systems I build and/or maintain, and internal business things. I reviewed it with an attorney, and believed their limited scope was acceptable and reasonable.

> Throwing your toys out of the ring because business is business is why open source has a funding problem.

There's a few assumptions there.

1. I helped *migrate* people away from (un)Freenode to Libera.chat . I didn't throw them away - i helped move people over for a mostly seamless experience.

2. That open source/free software has a funding problem... That's just a troll statement - you're assuming business needs are the same as FOSS. They're not. And unlike closed source proprietary, once FOSS code has been written, everyone can share. But you knew that; and that's why I call it a troll statement. It's disingenuous at its core.

I do commercial FOSS work without an NDA just fine. Seems it might just be a problem on your side...

One of the companies I worked for tried to avoid NDAs whenever it could. They were apparently full of retarded requirements like giving the customer full access to all of our systems for security review on demand, which of course is at odds with every other NDA requiring us not to share the information on those systems.

I am not sure how lawyers can write these requirements without noticing how impossible they are. Then again I had to can a project that was signed of by the lawyers of at least three different companies, the software licenses involved made it impossible to build a commercial or open source project from it (GPL, AGPL and at least two conflicting commercial ones). So it might just be that they have as much understanding of technology as I have of Chinese.

The way you choose to handle business doesn’t invalidate what he said, and you shouldn’t take that as a dig.

It is a double edged sword - he's also bound (and may not have been the initiator).