#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

Re:If you build it, they will come

[dzym]

That's not quite the point.

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.

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.

What I think the story is

[Bruce Perens]

Lilo (Rob Levin) contacted me some time ago looking for support for him to operate OPN full-time. My response was, and still is, that rather than have an organized IRC network operated by Rob, various projects should operate their own IRC servers, not very differently from the way that many projects operate mail and FTP servers.

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