> As I see it, we have a channel that we can exchange ideas on, > and that is good. > Does any more need to be said?
Yes.
The story about Freenode and OFTC is correctly:
On a chat room on EF-Net a few people agreed to the idea, that a dedicated chat network for Free and Open Source Projects should be founded.
That a few of these people see themselves as the "linpeople" does not really matter.
Fact is, that Rob Levin took the leadership over this and dedicated a lot of his spare time and energy to establish
OpenProjects.Net
When Rob Levin saw a chance to move his role to a sponsored full time job under the flag of a tax exempt organization, the network was renamed to Freenode under the organization "Peer Directed
Projects Center".
A few people who had a leading role within the Debian Project were jealous on Rob Levin and they disgreed on certain espects about how to run Freenode. This lead to hate and "anti-lilo websites".
Out of this "Anti Rob Levin" movement the idea of the OFTC network grew.
> Does this add value to the gNS mission?
Yes.
The gNewSense mission as Richard Stallman himself explains it in
interviews is about high ethical and moral standards, not only regarding some license that is written on a piece of paper.
The Debian Projects fails in these regards, as traffic on debian related mailing lists shows - debian developers dont value the Social
Contract they signed themselves.
Keywords: defacements of other developers and users and discrimination of people and groups.
So the OFTC network which is basically driven by Debian people cant be
seen as a sane alternative to Freenode.
But the leadership of Freenode has how multiple weaknesses since the tragic death of Rob Levin, when it comes to holding up strong standards of morals and ethics in context of Free and Open Source Projects.
The new leader of Freenode - Christel Dahlskjaer - is totally obsessed about having lots of romantic dates with geek boys. And sponsorships pay for plane trips all around the globe.
But in a previous posting I tried to express how shocked I am that such
a person looks up my secret phone number from nickserv to post it to that person who attacked me multiple times on IRC before.
If projects announce in public they care about strong morals and ethics regarding license matters, then I expect this is a topic to be cared
about also.
But since ompaul - one of the Freenode Staff Team - prefers to silence people instead of finding a solution to such problems ...
... I can only say the philosophy of this project is not worth the piece
of paper it is written on.