Ask HN: Could you elaborate why Freenode's “hostile takeover” started?
The heart of the issue, imo:
Andrew Lee has been sponsoring freenode either directly or indirectly since 2012. He acquired Freenode Limited in 2017, a point of contention. According to all parties, he never tried to exert influence over the network.
PIA's sponsorship started in 2012 and ended with Kape's acquisition. PIA's logo was on freenode.net from 2012-01-2x to 2021-01-05.
Shells' sponsorship started in 2021, the reason Shells' logo was added to freenode.net on 2021-02-25. From this point, former freenode staff considered Andrew hostile.
Consequently, staff revoked Andrew's access to freenode's DNS accounts and refused his requests for that to be undone. From this point, Andrew considered the staff hostile and invoked lawyers to regain control.
Everything that happened after these two events only occurred because both parties were acting, from their perspectives, in defense against a hostile actor.
My question to all of you is, does anyone know if the staff had undisclosed reasons to so quickly assume Andrew's ill intent? This is a person who's been sponsoring the project for 9 years now, and apparently there wasn't _one_ incident to suggest his interest in controlling the network.
In fact, the first party to deviate behavior from the past years was the staff, by revoking Andrew's access. Is there any evidence to Andrew's ill intentions _before_ his access was revoked? Why is everyone treating the Shells logo addition as the first "attack," without a single motive as to why that was now unacceptable?
I understand it was a shock for them to find out freenode was owned by Andrew. But they figuring that out is not evidence that change was coming from his end. Are there any accounts of Andrew trying to exert control since 2012?