Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea’s “crown prince” (original) (raw)

Yi Seok did not “discover” Lee until Lee was already a multimillionaire, and we are unaware of any concrete evidence regarding hereditary relationship between Lee and the former Joseon dynasty.Freenode has been the world’s largest IRC network since 2013, with roughly three times as many users as its closest competitor, IRCnet. Last week, the massive IRC network was taken over by tech entrepreneur and “Korean Crown Prince” Andrew Lee—a move that the network’s staff has apparently unanimously classified as a “hostile takeover,” although Lee himself claims these are only “rumors” and “simply untrue.”

At first blush, it’s tempting for an outside observer—someone who isn’t already familiar with the history of the network’s ownership and management—to shrug and say “well, who knows.” Lee lays out several hundred words of explanation in a blog post currently featured on Freenode’s front page—most of which sounds reasonable.

But the one question Lee never addresses—let alone answers—is why at least 14 separate staff members would quit en masse, all disagreeing with the story he tells.

A dubious contract

In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer—who was, at the time, head of Freenode staff—created a corporation, Freenode Ltd., which she immediately sold to Lee. Dahlskjaer and Lee told Freenode staff and users that the incorporation was only done as necessary paperwork in order to sponsor a conference and that day-to-day operations would remain unchanged.

Contract or no contract, staff and developers of Freenode maintain that it wasn’t actually possible to sell the network—the staff is all volunteers, and the infrastructure itself wasn’t owned by Dahlskjaer in the first place. According to resigning Freenode developer Aaron Jones, however, “Andrew has more money than us, and so we cannot fight this.”

Although the contract in question was signed in 2017, staffers didn’t begin objecting until this year, when operational changes began appearing without their control or consent.