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#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."
#slackware is allready splitting, and it appears #kernelnewbies has allready left too...... lilo' really needs to quit whinning and at least attempt to get a real job.
Debianplanet took that article down about an hour ago. I'm not sure why.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
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.
stuff
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.
For some better insight as to what was going on at the time, you should read at the very least this page.
See petition here.
Read Eterm developer Michael Jennings' thoughts on the matter here.
...to get a job.
Now.
He's been pulling this kind of crap repeatedly on OPN, and despite massive backlash in the face of his blatant give-me-money spam, he shows no signs of letting up any time soon.
I corresponded via dcc chat with him myself, (I am a former disgruntled IRCop from way back on that network) and he has personally told me 90% of the money donated goes toward his mortgage and food purchases. He seems to think of this as a way to support himself without having to resort to a real job but still maintaining the "free" and "open" implication of his irc network.
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.)
a bit more about me http://www.advogato.org/person/trelane/ or my private page http://trelane.net
The majority of the OSDN channels that were on OPN (#sourceforge, etc.) have already moved to SlashNET for IRC.
OPN is in a sad state, currently, with lilo constantly soliciting money and/or services from the IRCers. It just all seems rather childish to me.
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:
.. 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.)
1) Colocation and bandwidth
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.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Read all about it here:
http://www.lilofree.net
The OPN exodus started well before this fundraising initiative. It's all documented in the above URL.
This is necessary...life, feeds on life...
This money would be going to lilo's personal business-class DSL line with RDNS capability.
To wit, somegeek.org has ip 66.140.25.154 which is owned by Robert Levin (lilo) from Southwestern Bell Internet Services.
From June 13th:
Trolling for Dollars
From July 8th:
The Big Bully
[2221 lilo`(lilo@lilo.staff.opn)] you're saying that my asking for voluntary assistance based on my work on the network is abusive?
[2222 msg(lilo`)] I'm saying that your using the network to ask for personal donations which will benefit no one but yourself is an abuse of power. It's also arguable that such use of the network is now illegal given the NPO you formed to oversee the network.
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...
might want to be aware of this little feature at their disposal. Here on SlashNET, we frown at such things. I, as the ircd maintainer, refuse to include such things in our ircd and have refused patches such as this in the past. Evil stuff.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I fear (and I could be wrong) that Lilo has mixed up his personal goals with his estimation of the importance of the project to the community.
If and when I have grant money to hand out, either my own or that of a corporate sponsor, it will go directly to Free Software authors for production of Free Software, and to efforts to preserve our right to code like EFF.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
A petition I found for stopping lilo's silliness.
http://void.printf.net/~chris/petition.pl
I caught lilo doing this a couple of years ago (and have full irc logs of the dozens of conversations over the years), and was summarily g-lined from the network (being on that network as long as I have, there are many ways into and out of there, seen and unseen, he knows this as well). He knows who I am, and I have no reason to hide my identity. Now I'm regretting moving the several channels I relocated a few years ago to OPN.
I've been there when it was truly a free network, linpeople. It was then perverted into OpenProjects, and most-recently freenode. I notice that the motd over the years has changed from "This is a free network" (linpeople) to "This is a private network" (OPN, check your irc logs people, it's in there: "This is a private service, provided for and by private users and organizations. It is not a public forum."), to no mention of free or private (freenode). Was that an intentional omission? I believe so.
OPN has always been a very locked-down, authoritative (read: non-free) network. It will continue to be such, as long as the "maintainer" of the network refuses to delegate control of it. I've suggested this to him personally over 2 years ago, to which he scoffed. Fine, micromanage it into the ground.
The success of a project is measured if it survives its first maintainer. OPN will not, no matter how many times you rename it. It does not need "donations" to survive, even if Rob Levin needs money to survive. There are other ways to get money, Rob.. such as getting a paying job. Your ego prohibits you from doing so, as you and I have discussed before.
I've been out of work for a long time, as have many of my friends and former colleagues, and you don't see me asking for handouts, and I *DO* run an open irc network, Open Source CVS services, project hosting, web development, mailing lists, development on my own Open Source projects, and many other things... all without a cent. Why? Because I believe in it. I pay for my own bandwidth, my own servers, my own time. I ask for nothing in return. My "pay" is knowing I'm doing something good for the community as a whole. If you feel you need something back, don't hand it out for free. That's not what Open Source is about.
I would love to sit home all day and get paid to work on things I love, but unfortunately in the current economy, that's not reality.
Regarding those "donations" (i.e. used to pay for your rent, groceries, et al), have you begun paying the developers who help keep your network running? What about those who are maintaining the ircd code that you run on the network (dancer). Have they been compensated? Without the software, you don't have a network. What about server administrators? What about backups? Are you compensating your leaf nodes? Likely not.
This has been several years coming, and don't say I didn't warn you about it. You know I have see the demise long before now, and I've given you dozens of suggestions to avoid it. You refuse to listen, and you bear the burdon of those choices. I just hope that your head doesn't get so big that you and your ego can't fit outside the front door.
OPN is trying to establish itself as a pillar of the free software community, but unfortunately it's can't be trusted as a stable organisation. Despite it's "open" moniker, OPN has never made any attempt at democracy. It's an autocracy under Rob Levin (lilo). Even the likes of server owners and all the other IRCops have no final say. My understanding is that Rob even refused to give any IRCops contact information for server owners. He likes control of the network centralised around him.
Rob's priorities appear to be the following:
(1) is a fair priority for anyone to have, however in the case of OPN the lack of any balancing on Rob's power (eg a committee of IRCops with the power to veto decisions) make it dangerous, as we have seen. (2) is a danger to the network - Rob would rather see it split in half than step down. (3) should not take precedence over (4). I get the feeling that OPN could be an IRC network 100 times larger than it is right now, and it would still neglect what's wanted by the present userbase - not establishing nonprofits with the goal of evolving into some sort of free software monolith, but establishing a sane power structure with proper procedures for users to air grievances.
> 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.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
depends on their ops. When ops act childishly and crazily people will leave. The ops in OPN have this tendency.
The fund rasing is just a trigger for them to leave. I don't disagree lilo to raise fund, honestly, but he should at least spend some time to justify the ops' behavior.
So I left OPN. It has nothing to do with fund rasing.
Several IRC admins had similar problems with Galaxynet when two people who had control over services and the domain name summarily canceled the democratic principles of the original Policy and created a "founders" group with total control and no accountability. Exiled split away, wrote up its own Charter where even the IRCops have a vote and a say in the way the network is run.
Exiled is free and will remain so. It is strugging at the moment to find users and contributer to the coding of services and ircd. Debian (and any other users) is cordially invited to visit and try us out.
Swedchef
admin of seattle.wa.us.exiled.net
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
So the question should not be, to which IRC network we want to move, but where we want to move.
Ah, for all you standard weenies, SILC has been submitted to IETF as a next-generation chatting protocol draft. Really check it out, this is the future of chatting (and it's free and open source).