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nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore

I have dozens of friends and associates that I communicate with nearly exclusively on IRC. By nearly exclusively, I mean I might call them once every month or two, but I speak with them in IRC on a nearly daily basis. OFTC operates a ton of servers, and other outfits like freenode. Modern IRC is pretty feature rich; encryption, bouncers/relays, web-based clients, very rich native clients, and ANSI terminal clients (I use Irssi) are all supported.

Just using three degrees of separation from me, tens of thousands of people are using IRC at any given moment. Go further out in terms of separation and the number is much, much higher. Where did you get the idea that nobody uses IRC any more?

Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced.

How is one TXT or SPF record in DNS a huge PITA? It's incredibly simple. I host my own mail, along with mail for a bunch of other people and organizations. It's not that difficult, and my mail doesn't get bounced. My total involvement with my mail servers amounts to perhaps one hour per month, the total time taken to install security updates and make sure automated backups are running properly. If you don't want to invest this minimum of effort, that's fine, but please don't use the excuse that it's too difficult.

There's nothing wrong with freenode and even if you would have issues with it, there's always OFTC.

In short, "meh".

I'm a linode.com customer as a matter of fact. One of the things that impressed me the most initially was the open TOS/AUP... Don't do something illegal and you're fine. The message boards on the site also showed a strong since of community much as many large open source projects have. There's even an irc channel on OFTC that the owner hangs out in.

Actually dont use openprojects at all. Either use freenode.net, which is what OPN morphed into, or visit www.oftc.net and grab their server list.

OFTC (Open and Free Technology Commmunity) is all about opensource and code sharing. Essentially it was created when OPN started asking for money, and has a elected council to run the network. As far as i know, we have no warez channels.

Actually dont use openprojects at all. Either use freenode.net, which is what OPN morphed into, or visit www.oftc.net and grab their server list.

OFTC (Open and Free Technology Commmunity) is all about opensource and code sharing. Essentially it was created when OPN started asking for money, and has a elected council to run the network. As far as i know, we have no warez channels.

> The Perl Foundation does about the exact same thing and no one really bitches are around here.

There really isnt any comparison here. The perl
people are working on something [b]worthwhile[/b]. Thousands of people around the world depend on perl to get their job done. Freenode(OPN) is nowhere near as important and certainly not unique: there are hundreds of IRC networks around the globe providing exactly the same services, including OFTC which provides an excellent alternative. He doesnt pay the server hosting bills. He doesnt even work on the IRC server code - at least Rusty from kuro5hin contributes in his work on Scoop. Lilo literally wants to be paid to sit on IRC all day.

Of course, we moved to OFTC, which is run very well by a number of ex-OPN staffers. As an added bonus, their ircd has some nice protection against flooders and spammers, so the move to OFTC has technical advantages too...

You'd think that the official #debian channel would move to OFTC, since it's a member project of Software in the Public Interest and a sister project to Debian.

They're actually kind of late in doing so. Rob Levin's panhandling has already caused at least a few channels to move to OFTC.

These would be the same "competent" people that created a web page with black text on a dark blue background, thus rendering it unreadable, would it? Impressed, I am.

Thats exactly the point. Lilo doesnt believe that OPN could exist without him. When he makes his notices he believes it is for the good of OPN, because as he sees it, OPN == him.

In the past few weeks, several servers have delinked and quite a few of his staff has quit, fed up with his behaviour. He doesnt care. He's willing to hurt OPN (losing servers and knowledgable and useful members of staff) for his own ends.

In short, you cannot support OPN without supporting lilo, because he will destroy it before he lets anyone else have it. If you want to support the Open Source/Free Software community, support OFTC - its small but growing, and run by people who are a darn sight more competent and professional than lilo.