#debian & IRC Politics

eyez writes "Apparently, the recent decision of OPN(now freenode) to ask for donations has ruffled the feathers of a few debian people. This article on DebianPlanet talks about the current discussion on the debian mailing lists which talks about the possibility of moving #debian (and #debian*) off of OPN altogether."

Comments

reason for donations

[crazney]

Just incase you haven't been listening. The reason for the plee for donations is to go into the pocket of the IRCops - mainly 1: Lilo.
(no, not to maintain the servers, bandwidth, etc etc).

Why? Because he doesnt have a job and is finding it hard to survive.
The reason he claims is because he spends so much time admining OPN..

Has he thought of maybe offloading some of the work to someone else? Probably, but then he'd have to get a job.

What about banners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should Debian users avoid visiting sites that use banners just because it's not free? ( Free, as in woohoo, I'm as cheap as it gets ).
Come on. There's nothing wrong about donations. It's just another way YOU could help software and services get BETTER. You don't have to, but it would be nice if you did.
Said that, I don't see any reason to donate to OPN.

last post from this nick

[trelaneopn]

About 2 months ago I was on OPN staff, about two months ago, I cared. I started WOPN, and frankly without me, OPN (or free whatever it is) would still be just an irc network without me. It is my impression you'll shortly see advertisements (or at least friendly plugs (which I have seen other dj's do)). I quit both the semi-official staff position I had (of course lilo gives noone real power) and left the radio station. After an argument with one of the more dense opers on the network, I created my own server and the xiph foundation and I moved to another network. The opn at the end of this name is a relic and this name will NEVER be used again to post.

At the risk of being accused of having an "anger management issue" or being a "Troll" I say this. Anyone who stays on opn needs to conduct a serious reality check. THIS IS NOT FREEDOM ANYMORE. THIS IS A FORCED OPPRESSION. MOVE!

Andrew D Kirch
Trelane (all references on the advogato link below will be shortly stripped of any reference to any work done on opn, but will be kept as a historic reference to prove the above claims.)

The mysteries behind OPN/freenode donations

[eyez]

What really bothers me is WHY they're taking donations for this, and for this much ($25k in 6 months!)... To explain, here's a breakdown of the major costs of IRC networks:

1) Colocation and bandwidth

.. Well, that's it really. So how does this affect OPN (I don't think 'freenode' is a fitting name for an irc network that solicits donations)? It doesn't. OPN's servers are donated. When you sponsor a server for OPN, you let them run the ircd on your server and use the bandwidth required. You do NOT get an O:line with that. (For those that don't know, the O:line is Oper privileges; it's how you administer an irc server. OPN is the only network I've ever heard of that doesn't let you have an O: on your own machine.)

OPN is a relatively small network, with only 7000 or so clients connected at once. The Major IRC networks, such as quakenet, ircnet, undernet, efnet, etc, do NOT solicit or accept donations, and they have 80,000-100,000+ clients at once.

IRC is also a very low-traffic service. A two-server network on t1+ lines could EASILY handle the entire load of opn users.

So, why does OPN/freenet need the donations? I don't know. The numbers just don't add up to me. The servers are all donated, so they pay no network/bandwidth costs. And 7000 users isn't that much to admin over. (Talking to a quakenet admin earlier today, he mentioned somewhere around 90k users on in over 9000 channels), And it's certainly not something that should warrant full-time effort.

There are plenty of alternatives to OPN out there; there's the new oftc, and there's quite a few smaller ones, like irc.gimp.org, etc. Almost all IRC networks offer free nick/channel registration (certainly all that I can think of), so there's not really that much that OPN does that other networks can't do for your opensource project.

And I can't think of a SINGLE irc network out there that solicits or accepts donations, besides the one with 'free' in it's new name. Most IRC networks are adminned by volunteers who keep the servers up because they like IRC and are dedicated to helping the network.

You could argue that having a lot of projects having channels on the same network is helpful, but that seems really moot to me. I can't think of a single modern irc client that doesn't offer multi-server support, and for most clients it's well-documented and trivial to set up.

I don't like to pass judgement, but It really seems to me like all the flames about lilo only doing this to get out of having to have a real job at least have some SOME truth to them. I just can't think of any other explanation as to why they'd need that much money.

Re:How is this different from the Perl Foundation?

[sfraggle]

> 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.