What irks me is that the former staff could have said something along the lines of "it's come to our attention freenode is owned by a privately owned company, something we can't stand behind. Join us at Libera Chat to participate in a truly community-owned network" and everyone would still side with them.

Instead, they decided to portray this as a hostile takeover in order to gather further sympathy from the public at large without providing any evidence that Andrew actually planned this.

Christel could have cleared any misunderstandings to both sides, yet she is the only person who got anything out of this, with an acquisition and a salary, while Andrew is the target of a smear campaign after spending who knows how much money sponsoring freenode for years, and the staff and community had to create a brand new network after spending who knows how much time on running freenode for years.