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A rough synopsis of reading through chatlogs + memory. Some of this could be wrong.
My (biased) tl;dr: Freenode staff say the network is not owned by anyone as it's a hodgepodge of volunteers and donated hardware, while rasengan says he and his company own it and have operational control over it
The Players
Freenode is a volunteer network. The staff are all volunteers (henceforth Volunteer Staff), and the infrastrucure is all donated by sponsors. The sponsors retain ownership of the hardware, and simply grant ssh access to the Volunteer Staff to use it. ("...access to those servers is held by the long-term established internal infrastructure team")
Freenode Limited is a corporate (?) entity created to host/run https://freenode.live/ (the freenode conference). I don't know all the details here, so won't add more.
A few years ago, London Trust Media (the parent company of Private Internet Access), purchased Freenode Limited. Rasengan (Andrew Lee) owns/is on the board of London Trust Media. (Also, I had forgotten this, but London Trust Media owns Snoonet too! They purchased it a few years ago.)
I don't know the specifics of the purchase, other than what the Volunteer Staff wrote today in #freenode, which is that London Trust Media (through Freenode LTD), "may or may not have claims" to domains/trademarks for Freenode. The Volunteer Staff think Freenode LTD does not, but imply that rasengan thinks he does. The Volunteer Staff also write that they, being volunteers, have no contracts with Freenode LTD, and the sponsors who donate hardware also have no contracts with Freenode LTD.
One of the main issues is the
freenode.netdomain is registered to Freenode LTD, so is under the control of rasengan and NOT the Volunteer Staff. ("website: us. DNS hosting: us. domain: him.") (us being Volunteer Staff, him being rasengan)
Additional Issues As Pulled From #Freenode Logs
rasengan (Andrew Lee) has claimed that the Freenode Volunteer Staff (jess, tomaw, fuchs, etc) are trying to do a "hostile takeover" of Freenode. He asserts that this hostile takeover is what drove Christel (the person who facilitated the sale of Freenode LTD to London Trust Media) out in the first place (note: Christel was noted as having resigned at the end of March: https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/pull/493). He also writes that the Volunteer Staff ban users abusively, and that "...Freenode policies have been shaped for [the Volunteer Staff] and [their] posse to extract value and now [they]’re holding it hostage while asking people to go to another network." Rasengan then talks about how he has supported Freenode with funding & legal aid.
The Volunteer Staff share quotes from rasengan, where he had previously stated that he would not "...interfere with the operations of Freenode outside of when asked for help...". Additionally, the Volunteer Staff have self-assembled their team ("...tomaw doesn't claim to be anything. christel resigned and we (all, collectively) elected tomaw to the head of staff position. tomaw had nothing to do with it. if you're going to keep up with these lies I'm going to mute you.").
The Volunteer Staff state that they drafted their resignation letters in "...protest of [rasengan's] stated intentions to seize control of the network...". Rasengan then replies, "I didn't cease control. Control was ceased from freenode limited." I laugh a lot at how his typos make him seem like he's supporting the Volunteer Staff.
Rasengan is going to "...post the decentralization of freenode plan today...". Whatever that means — Freenode is already decentralized (more federated, I guess) in that the hardware is donated on a limited basis.
Volunteer Staff say that rasengan had asked them to given admin access to some users that rasengan proposed. These are not users who are a part of the Volunteer Staff team.
Trusted Channel
- While freenode.net is registered by Freenode LTD, the Freenode organization on Github is solely run by the Volunteer Staff. They mention that the freenode.net blog is dynamically generated from content in https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/tree/main/content/news. So, if you don't trust freenode.net, you can get the content straight from the Volunteer-Staff-controlled source here (in case of any updates).
Extra Credits:
Chatlog between Ariadne Conill (security team chair for Alpine Linux, they make heavy use of their Freenode channels) and "nirvana" (AKA rdv, "one of the snoonet founders, shady and pretty nasty guy"): https://distfiles.dereferenced.org/stuff/nirvana-log.txt (related tweet thread https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1392995496403341313)
Volunteer Staff provided this log from the user prawnsalad, (edit: prawnsalad says "i was not involved in the Snoonet buy out by a long time. id rather not get dragged into all this, thanks"): https://sand.cat/fiW5QDYXauoKwybL/snoo-takeover.txt
More on snoonet/LTM: https://web.archive.org/web/20191021113301/https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/7b3f5929dadc81c39228e373fa0ca569
