Andrew Lee formed a contract with the head staffer of freenode a few years ago, both of whom insisted that it was only a sponsorship, but did not release any further info, and that Andrew would have no operational/executive control over the network.

Now, it turns out that the contract was a sale of everything that could be had, and Andrew does want full operational and executive control.

Learning this, the volunteer staff resign as a bloc, and move to start an alternative. 250 projects (from Ubuntu, to PostgreSQL, SourceHut, the IRCv3 Working Group, etc) have all left freenode to head to Libera the volunteer network.

Losing all his projects, Andrew insists that "freenode is for FOSS" while at the same time shaming foss projects who want to exercise the freedom to choose their own chat platform and hiring a very dubious set of IRC "personalities" as staff.

The core of it is simply that the person who was head of Freenode staff at the time (an employee of Lee's, also) sold something to Lee that was not hers to sell. After promises from Lee to not interfere, the staff later found out this was not the case and left to create a new home for the projects hosted on Freenode. Whether those projects move is entirely up to them.

I’m not immersed in IRC culture but I used to hang out on Freenode a bit, and I think it’s quite obvious that top-down dictatorial decisions like the recent “hijacking” of channels for mentioning Libera (or whatever actually happened there) are toxic to community building. To the people actually doing the community building, choosing Freenode now looks a bit like founding a city in the shadow of an active volcano, with a capricious force immune to accountability who can (and demonstrably will) nuke your decades-old community structures without any meaningful warning.

FOSS is rife with stupid drama and I don’t think either “side” here is an exception, but the recent “purge” goes above and beyond. I would absolutely never consider trying to start a community there now, for entirely pragmatic reasons.

Think of it this way: Joe Biden got elected a few years ago which made some people uneasy, but he didn't really do anything so they let it be. Now he's started actually interfering in government, adding more and more regulations, so all the Americans started migrating to Mexico, but then Biden put up a Berlin Wall to keep the Americans in. And wrote a blog post pretending everything is fine, like a Soviet disinformation campaign.

Slight change, at least in that case the __people__ would have wanted him.

It's more like if Joe Biden somehow appeared with a trillion dollars, bought the Presidency from the former President (Can the President even do that? Probably not, but it happened!) and went "Yeah I own this now." And then add in the rest of your comment and it matches up pretty well.

Ah yes, that is indeed a correction.