My resignation from freenode
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin. Fuck you Christel, lilo's life work did not deserve this.
What you knew as freenode after 12:00 UTC of May 19 will be managed by different people.
As I have no desire to volunteer under the new regime, this marks the end of my involvement with freenode. It had started in 1999 when I encouraged the good parts of #linux-it to leave ircnet, and soon after I became senior staff. Even if I have not been very active recently, at this point I was the longest-serving freenode staff member and now I expect that I will hold this record forever.
The people that I have met on IRC, on freenode and other networks, have been and still are a very important part of my life, second only to the ones that I have known thanks to Usenet. I am not fine, but I know that the communities which I have been a part of are not defined by a domain name and will regroup somewhere else.
The current freenode staff members have resigned with me, these are some of their farewell messages:
Together we have created Libera.Chat, a new IRC network based on the same principles of the old freenode.