Having decided to move their channels to Libera, with a final transition date of June 25th, the Free Software Foundation channels were seized by freenode staff early today.

The best IRC admins are levelheaded and slow to anger.

Andrew Lee doesn't seem to have found many such people when he recruited new volunteers for Freenode.

It seems to me as Lee wants to force everybody away from Freenode to Libera and other servers. I just don't understand why.

Much as Freenode Ltd/Andrew Lee may be seen as having taken over Freenode it is clear that disloyal and morally suspect Freenode domain administrators are as much to blame.

Whoever transferred those domains must have known the possible consequences but were clearly not deterred.

Did they inform the community or consult them before?

You.. you've heard about the whole Libera thing, right? The thing where literally all of existing staff went "We're being legally forced to do the thing. freenode is bad now. we have an alternative available"?

The problem is Freenode was run without any proper legal and management structures in place.

Obviously a lot of its administrators ignored the fact that some admin could simply hock Freenode's domain names to a third party and when Andrew Lee purchases the domains with the intent of profiting from them, they start crying foul.

The blame for the whole debacle lies with Freenode's admins or the people involved in it who should have seen this coming from way off.

It is no different from some venture capitalists trying to profit from the .org domains.

Well, yes; the head of the organisation gave away the domains in exchange for a job. Everyone gets into a tight spot sometime; Freenode wasn't structured to deal with that challenge.

Why didn't they appeal to the community for funds via a GofundMe or something?

I'm sure they would have got some support

Freenode, the organization, wasn't in a tight spot. The head of Freenode staff at the time, Christel, sold assets to Andrew Lee without disclosing the terms to the rest of the Freenode staffers. Andrew Lee is one of the people who benefited from the MtGox collapse and basically could intimidate people with lawyers until he got his way.

The whole of the Freenode staff, minus Christel, basically saw no option but to walk away knowing the kind of person Andrew Lee is. And now everyone else knows for we can see what he did to Freenode itself when it was entirely in his hands.

Libera is where they walked away towards and it's doing just fine.

For her troubles, Christel is now a CCO at PIA, one of Andrew Lee's former companies.

Freenode wasn't in trouble until Andrew decided it was his.