Abbreviated: A LLC has enough papers to prove that they own Freenode, and they have more money than the Freenode past volunteers to spend in court fighting over this. Hence the Freenode volunteers decided to abandon Freenode.
Lesson: Even though you are a fully volunteer organization, always maintain an explicit paper trail that holds in court who owns and what, or someone will at some point simply come up with some documentation to their advantage and claim what you've built as their own.
Actually they almost certainly don't. But they don't need to, either; they can just suppress the staff through legal threats, because lawsuits are expensive. Whether they are in the right is immaterial.
In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer—who was, at the time, head of Freenode staff—created a corporation, Freenode Ltd., which she immediately sold to Lee.
Sounds like some money exchanged hands.
Someone bought the freenode domain name
The group of people that ran freenode get in an argument with that person
All of the previous administrators leave to start libera
the new owner of freenode installs his own administrators.
Channels start switching to libera
freenode bans any one discussing libera
freenode seizes channels that are in the process of migrating, because they consider libera competition.
Lots of HN discussion: https://www.google.com/search?q=freenode+site%3Anews.ycombin...
* Founder lilo/Rob died.
* Christel became new head of staff.
* Christel "sold" Freenode to Andrew Lee (of which was not hers to sell) and never told the rest of Freenode staff the terms.
* Lee decided to assert himself by claiming he owned all of Freenode and that the staff had to hand over the keys to the kingdom to him.
* Staff resisted, Lee used threats. Staff decided it was better to move on.
* Libera.chat formed.
* Since the majority of Freenode was the relationship a lot of projects had with the now ex-Freenode staffers, most decided to go with the staff to Libera.
* Lee threw a fit and decided to use a bot to hijack 700+ channels that happened to mention "libera" in the topic, regardless if the channel actually intended to move over. This included channels owned by IBM, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Wikimedia, GCC, etc...
* Channel takeovers continued despite his apology when caught.
* Lee is certifiable. https://corrupt.tech/1708590130-ocr-compressed.pdf
If this is the case, is anyone pursuing a way to invalidate the sale?
However, it should be noted that she is the CCO of PIA, which was Lee's company before he sold it.
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
After that, at every turn when Andrew Lee has been given the choice between doing the right thing and acting like a comic book villain, he has chosen the latter.
Removed any restraint on staff, tried to bribe FOSSHOST to be the face of his operations, hired known trolls and right-wing extremists as staff.
More materially, he has killed or driven away ##linux, #fsf, #gnu, #archlinux, #gentoo, #fedora, #ubuntu, #wikipedia and OVER 700 MORE PROJECTS:
https://github.com/siraben/freenode-exodus
And he is not done yet. He has announced that soon he will switch the whole network over to a new irc daemon, which he will fail at because he doesn't know how and the people who do won't touch him with a 7-foot pole:
https://www.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/nyp855/new_freenode_ma...
IMHO, at this point you need to seriously consider the possibility that everything he's touched, including Freenode, could be compromised in some way, if not already a literal "honeypot"...
Off-topic: I love his new house: https://www.insider.com/south-korean-royals-california-mansi...