It all started several days ago, when drafts of resignation letters surfaced
publicly. Since then, most of the volunteer staff (if not all of them), resigned
from Freenode to form their own network: Libera Chat. The reason? An allegedly a
bad actor, and Korean Imperial family member[1][2] as well as proud home owner[3],
wants to take over the network. You can read more about it on the various
letters[4][5][6] written by said staff. For a quick recap, you may opt to read
the "WTF is going on?"[7] summary.

In effect, the DNS will be managed by Freenode Limited while the actual network,
which are donations, may be moving elsewhere. The captains have left the ship,
which is still sailing blindy.

Now that it stewed about, several communities seem to agree with the decision of the staff:

* https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-May/076920.html
* https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-05-19-liberachat/
* https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2021q2/006893.html

What does it means for devuan? The situation will be discussed in the next
devuan meet[8]. Reminder that the meetings are open for everyone to participate,
so long people have something pertinent to add. A fact that I didn't know until
recently. So, for all of you folks who idle on the irc channel, you may soon
need to review your bookmarks.

Cheers,
Ludovic


[1]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/andrew-lee-named-new-korean-crown-prince-300731986.html
[2]: https://imperialfamily.com/
[3]: https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2020-12-01/south-korean-royals-buy-thousand-oaks-home-12-6-million
[4]: https://kline.sh/
[5]: https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461
[6]: https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt
[7]: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409
[8]: https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20210519.142651.a83fb14b.en.html