I don't think tomaw was aware that freenode ltd owned anything apart from the freenode live conference, until the legal discussions happened. So from his point of view it would have been a case of "Why should the people we ran a conference with in 2017/2018 have access to our domain?"

That implies christel was the only staff with access to DNS until now and was hiding that fact, since the domain's been registered to Freenode Limited since at least 2018 and they'd have noticed the change had they been accessing it.

I've been reading more into it and it seems that wasn't the case [1], but that just leaves me with more questions.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/realrasengan/f569c5e4727d21eb939fff9...

Understanding that:

(a) Freenode ltd had access to the domain

(b) Freenode ltd should have access to the domain

(c) Freenode ltd is the rightful owner of the domain

are three very different matters. How often do you whois your employer's domain?

Otherwise, if you've just been appointed leader of an operational staff and believe your organisation owns everything involved, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start introducing basic infosec practices around limiting access (or if it was caused by mandating security measures like 2fa, as mentioned elsewhere in thread)

Not often, but maybe when its parent company goes through a merger and the head of staff makes a public announcement saying "the freenode project will continue being part of and having access to support from the Imperial Family Companies (formerly London Trust Media Holdings (LTMH))." [1]

Since I believe freenode to be completely community-owned apart from some holding company that's supposed to host a conference, at that point I might check our WHOIS records and maybe our own policies [2] and question who I'm actually volunteering for.

[1]: https://freenode.net/news/freenode-pia-changes

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180606130945/https://freenode....