I'm personally nervous about the state of the freenode IRC network.
To wit, I am personally not terribly interested in continuing to use it as a backdrop for my own Haskell development efforts if it winds up unilaterally controlled by Andrew Lee.
It is one thing to do development work inside an open platform with decentralized control with ops and users you've known and come to trust over 15 years of collaboration. It is another to wake up apparently owned by a literal prince whom apparently holds grand visions of empire building. This is admittedly a particularly uncharitable reading of recent events.
Andrew's attempts to obtain (retain? IANAL and I don't know all of the specifics) operational control of the network have created a lot of anxiety in me. In my view it seems antithetical to the principles that at least some of us who use the network day in and day out seem to believe it grew to embody over time.
So why am I posting this in the /r/haskell? When I first left EFnet and DALnet and joined Freenode as a user, it was to join the #haskell IRC channel. That community has given back to me in oh so many ways, but first and foremost it is a community.
It had seemed that the larger freenode community had learned from lilo seemingly treating the OPN as his personal piggybank that they didn't want one party controlling the whole thing. Yet here we are, now with the guy who owns irc.com consolidating control and steering a narrative (rasengan is Andrew Lee).
Whether he is legally in the right to somehow "own" the entire community or not, I don't know and to a large extent don't care. As a member of the community in question it behooves me to ask if this is the direction I want to go, rather than to just go along with the flow. Andrew Lee has no right to my attention or custom, and has earned no particular goodwill on my part. In fact, with the ultimate fate of Mt. Gox, I'd say it's rather the opposite, which is in part why I'm here today expressing these concerns.
At the end of the day I'm here for the people I talk to and work with on IRC day in and day out and not for the name of the network. I've been on IRC since well before IRCnet and EFnet split apart; this isn't my first rodeo. And, heck, at this point we don't even know if Andrew is going to stick to his guns and try to claw back control of the network, the services database, the domain name from the team of volunteers that have been maintaining it this whole time.
That said, I'm a bit rusty on what other resources exist. I've been lulled to complacency by the relative stability of the freenode network up until this point. Now I'm at least personally forced awake.
At the risk of crying fire in a crowded moviehouse, I have questions:
-
What open-source-friendly IRC networks exist?
-
Should I (we?) weather the storm and see where this goes? Do we stay here because the cost of moving is too high or concerns are overblown? Boldly take a stance and preemptively move to another network?
-
If I do flit off, take drastic action, and up and leave, should I try to drag the #haskell community with me? Disruption and change are painful. Newcomers get lost along the way. Existing resources do point to the #haskell irc.freenode.net link.
-
Do we even value IRC itself as a communication medium? There are so many competing forms of media these days from matrix to discord to discourse to gitter to zulip. But that being said, we do have 1000+ people sitting in the IRC channel today, so any final decision on this front shouldn't be made lightly. That said, at the same time, I do think that decisions should consciously be made.
Again these are my personal thoughts, no official action is being taken at this time.
Thoughts and feedback are very much welcome.
-Edward Kmett
No comments:
Post a Comment