At the end of the day, the “community” has spoken and looks to be moving over. I see so many negative posts on this thread against Andrew & Freenode, I can understand if they are upset and react in the way they have re banning such libera.chat messages.
Going to other channels and advertising the same would be spammy.
For an analogy - say I have a repo on github. And I decide to move it to gitlab. Would it be fair for me to update the readme on github to say that the repo is now being maintained at gitlab?
And would it be fair for github to take control of the repo so they can pretend it hasn't?
Which, in the spirit of FOSS, should be ok. Going to https://freenode.net/ right now shows the tagline "freenode exists for FOSS" but limiting people from changing IRC server by blocking messages or changing topics feels very much against the spirit of FOSS.
> I see so many negative posts on this thread against Andrew & Freenode, I can understand if they are upset and react in the way they have re banning such libera.chat messages.
I think this is why many are moving away from Freenode as well. You don't want a supposedly impartial network to start banning users and channels left and right because they get upset. You want to have a stable network for your projects channel, and right now it seems Libera is a much better place for just that.
Not to say this is the same situation here as from what I understand, the guys who did the most work are moving to LC.
I just hope the same thing doesn’t happen to LC down the track, if it ever does, it will be an interesting case study of how they react.
But yes, looks like LC is now the home of IRC and for the foreseeable future should be drama free.
Insofar that I understand the issue, Andrew wasn't the one running a large community, he was the owner of the company holding the domain used by that community. The ones running the community were the oppers, who have since migrated to run LC.
No FOSS project has ever had any particular obligation to keep their IRC presence on Freenode, and migrating from one IRC network to another has always been a pretty standard thing (if uncommon for any given community).
These communities don't belong to Lee or to Freenode, and acting like moving to LC or any other network is somehow a violation of any reasonable IRC policy is just ludicrous. Any network that had a policy that that was in violation of is not a network I would ever want to be part of a community on: it's draconian and entirely self-serving.
And now "freenode" effectively hijacked established community centers, changed the locks, sometimes for the very "crime" of discussing whether to move... or stay. A lot took a wait&see approach, some were more decisive and used channel flags to prevent people getting lost, thinking they got official org channel while arriving in a dead one full of lurkers that forgot to kill a ZNC somewhere.
I feel like only a non-open networks would forbid advertising that the project moved to another place.
But completely unrelated to that, it seems that Freenode took control of communities that haven't moved to libera.chat: Allegro (https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629...), Elixir (https://twitter.com/AmNicd/status/1397448111291879424).
If members of the Apache board came in and shut that down, I would take that as a clear signal that they valued their own brand / power / whatever over the community. It would be understandable from a human nature, but it would destroy a lot of the respect I have for them and their principles.