Gregory Maxwell wrote:

On 6/24/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:

...

A little announcement by Lilo, the director of PDPC and the head of staff of freenode. For those who do not know... Freenode is ... our irc service...

I'd think we'd be better off if people on this list donated first to wikipedia. Freenode is a nice project but wikipedia provides something quite unique. We already have to run our own IRC servers for recent changes...

Freenode's an important service for the open source community at large; it's helpful to be on the same network as it's a little easier to pop over to another project's channel for help & to be helped.

We're really not interested in maintaining an IRC network of our own; we have a limited read-only server for the RC changes, which doesn't involve all the hassles of protecting against person-to-person attacks, crapflooders, etc. The only reason we've got that at all is that the RC bots kept getting automatically kicked from freenode due to their volume, a very specialized case.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On 6/24/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:

In short, we dedicate another organisation to take care of a tool which has become essential to us. I think this is fair to help them... just as readers think we are an essential tool and support us.

'nuff on the topic. You want to help, you do. You do not want to help, you do not. Simple and light like air :-)

I suppose that is fair enough, but I thought freenode's near constant pandering for support on IRC was enough. I'm not the only one that thinks this: several notable free software projects avoid freenode as well.

Back when I was a part of Xiph.org, we setup our own irc network because we became tired of freenode's constant nagging of our contributors and several other free projects moved onto it for the several years I ran it.

--- Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

I'd think we'd be better off if people on this list donated first to wikipedia.

It is already the case that Wikimedia gets lots and lots of donation money. Directing people to Freenode will not hurt us at all and if that can help that network to stay up, then we can continue to concentrate on our goals.

-- mav

____________________________________________________ Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com

On 7/2/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:

Then why doesn't Wikimedia just donate to Freenode? :-p

Because our donors have been given the impression the money was going towards Wikimedia's own servers and not to third parties. If this is going to be done in future, the "how we spend the money" page needs to be updated to reflect that.

Freenode's fundraising drive has now finished successfully by the way.

Angela.

On 7/2/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:

Oh, so you have defined the purpose for Wikimedia donations too narrowly. I wouldn't have thought the purpose was restricted to hardware only. If it was something general like "to help the Wikimedia projects" or whatever, then certainly helping our fellow IRC network falls under it because it helps Wikimedians and therefore indirectly helps Wikimedia.

I didn't mean to imply that it was only for hardware, but that when it was spent on hardware, people will expect that it is spent on our own. Not everyone supports freenode's fundraising efforts, so if funding is to go to that, they should be told so before making their donation. It would be useful if those people who object would explain their objections on this list since I'm not aware of anyone, other than Gregory, who has made their objections to this public.

Angela.

Jerome Jamnicky:

Not directly related, but I'm told that there are plenty of IRC networks which are as stable as or more stable than Freenode, and which get by with no donations of money at all. Which leads to the question, why donate at all? I haven't been able to find an answer for this yet.

What alternative do you have in mind? I don't think a network of Freenode's size will be able to survive without either fundraising or sponsors. Freenode could probably get more sponsorship, but it's good to avoid dependency situations. I have seen big IRC networks shut down because a major sponsor suddenly lost interest.

I think being part of the largest open source chat network in existence is also very compatible with our general philosophy. As I type this:

#gentoo - 827 people online #debian - 723 people online #ubuntu - 452 people online ##linux - 390 people online #python - 371 people online ##c - 329 people online #fedora - 321 people online

and so on. For people with a simple IRC client that doesn't support multiple connections, being able to hop easily from one cool channel to the next is a big benefit. In practical terms, not being on a network with lots of skript kiddies and warez channels is desirable from a public relations perspective, from a signal/noise perspective, and from a DoS attack perspective.

$16,000 of their fundraising goal goes into lilo's salary. This is quite ridiculously small pay given the amount of time he puts into the project. Except for the occasional downtime (*cough* Wikipedia *cough*), I find the network to be very pleasant. There are useful services like ChanServ, NickServ, SeenServ, MemoServ, good documentation, and there's generally someone available to help you.

Now, why they changed the perfectly cromulent name "openprojects.net" into freenode.net, I will never understand.

Erik

Erik Moeller wrote:

Jerome Jamnicky:

...

Not directly related, but I'm told that there are plenty of IRC networks which are as stable as or more stable than Freenode, and which get by with no donations of money at all. Which leads to the question, why donate at all? I haven't been able to find an answer for this yet.

What alternative do you have in mind?

I had in mind either using an IRC network which doesn't need fundraising, or just not bothering with helping Freenode to raise money.

I don't think a network of Freenode's size will be able to survive without either fundraising or sponsors. Freenode could probably get more sponsorship, but it's good to avoid dependency situations. I have seen big IRC networks shut down because a major sponsor suddenly lost interest.

Freenode's budget: http://freenode.net/fundraiser.shtml

If you look at the budget, you'll see that none of it (except perhaps the "telecoms" portion of the $2250 portion near the bottom of the list) is allocated to network infrastructure.

From talking to people who run IRC networks, what I hear is that in fact it isn't a problem to run networks of such a size without any donated money. For example you can ask Domas who runs Aitvaras; see users/channels stats comparison here: http://irc.netsplit.de/cgi-bin/ncompare.cgi?n1=Aitvaras&n2=freenode

I think being part of the largest open source chat network in existence is also very compatible with our general philosophy. As I type this:

#gentoo - 827 people online
#debian - 723 people online
#ubuntu - 452 people online
##linux - 390 people online
#python - 371 people online
##c     - 329 people online
#fedora - 321 people online

and so on. For people with a simple IRC client that doesn't support multiple connections, being able to hop easily from one cool channel to the next is a big benefit. In practical terms, not being on a network with lots of skript kiddies and warez channels is desirable from a public relations perspective, from a signal/noise perspective, and from a DoS attack perspective.

$16,000 of their fundraising goal goes into lilo's salary. This is quite ridiculously small pay given the amount of time he puts into the project. Except for the occasional downtime (*cough* Wikipedia *cough*), I find the network to be very pleasant. There are useful services like ChanServ, NickServ, SeenServ, MemoServ, good documentation, and there's generally someone available to help you.

I've no doubt that Freenode is a pretty good place to be for Wikipedia & co., in that it's a relatively sane environment. Yes, there is a sort of lock-in effect because of the difficulty in using more than one IRC network at a time. The bit about working for small pay is confusing, given the bucketloads of people who work for $0 per year, some more than full-time.

From googling I see that this question has been asked many times: Why can't Freenode get by with just volunteer labour, since other networks can do it? _Apparently_ nobody ever gives a straight answer to this, hence my previous email. Someone could claim that the good environment of Freenode requires a paid employee, but I haven't seen that argument made.

Now, why they changed the perfectly cromulent name "openprojects.net" into freenode.net, I will never understand.

Erik

Note that I have nothing against Freenode or lilo; I'm just trying to make sense of a confusing situation.

---- Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com