Today, they put their own ideals ahead of their users. Their objections to Mibbit have been: It's not open source, It makes money
Working with Mibbit clearly costs freenode time and resources that they would rather not spend. Since Mibbit makes money, perhaps you should consider entering into a contractual relationship to provide them with financial incentive and other guarantees, in exchange for their investment in supporting your service?
The 'abuse' reason I believe is a red herring. Abuse is easy enough to deal with, and them operating their own web client won't change how often people abuse using a web client.
The abuse from Mibbit has been the only reason (in months) that I've had to set myself as an operator and ban users. As a user, I don't feel this is a 'red herring'.
So, IMHO, a sad day for Freenode and all that they used to represent, but an opportunity to create a new haven for hackers.
I'm perfectly happy on Freenode, and our IRC channels are quite vibrant. I hope you can reach a resolution with the Freenode staff.
I offered to sponsor servers, to help with coding, etc many many times. My emails were ignored. When I popped into #freenode to ask, they said "We assumed you wanted something in return so we ignored them".
I also offered to help with the abuse. I've asked several times for details of abuse. I haven't been able to get concrete details on what abuse happens, when, what they have to do etc. The staff are incredibly secretive - unlike other networks, they don't link servers, their staff run everything, and I believe this was one of the reasons - they want complete control over everything including web clients.
Out of 500 or so people @peak times, I think the abuse level was really low. Also it's easily solved with a WEBIRC setup which we have with a large number of IRC networks (Which we never hear from, because abuse is handled by WEBIRC and their own systems as with direct connections).
I hope freenode will decide to reconsider, but they clearly want people to use their own web client, rather than mibbit. It would have been nice to at least give people some notice rather than just shut off access.
We (#perl) banned mib_* nicks and found anybody smart enough to type their own nickname in was generally fine. Plus we learned how to extract the original IP from the mibbit host string so we could nuke ban evaders comfortably even without freenode supporting WEBIRC.
In fact, we were planning to have mibbit links to freenode#perl showing up all sorts of places in the perl community to try and make it easier for people to get onto IRC and ask questions when they got stuck with things. I've notified the guys working on that to hang fire until we work out what the hell is going on.
Most annoying, whoever's fault it is (and being an argument on the internet I'm going to default to "everybody's, and especially mine, even if I wasn't involved" :)
As I understand it, axod offered financial incentives aplenty but freenode wasn't interested.
Freenode's position seems to be that they will never trust any third party, no matter what that third party does. The most oft-repeated argument on #freenode was not about the hassle of dealing with bad users (everyone, including axod, agreed with the sentiment of mibbit and freenode working together to resolve those), but that it was actually not possible for mibbit to do anything to resolve that problem.
I'm sure you don't like to hear that, but I sat on that channel for a long while reading what was being said, and Freenode were behaving like a bunch of power-tripping bureaucrats. Every time axod, or anyone else, asked "what can mibbit do, concretely, to make you happy?" the answer was either "make mibbit open-source" or "nothing", or, "axod should have discussed this with us a year ago, it's too late now".
It's a real shame for an IRC network with the legacy of freenode to behave like that. I had a lot of respect for freenode prior to this, but I don't have much left after today. The sad thing is it wouldn't take much effort on the part of freenode to regain that respect... so I'm hoping you and your freenode colleagues come to a saner decision and work with axod to resolve this in an amicable fashion.
I sat on the same channel you did, and I came away with a fundamentally different impression. The "make mibbit OS" were either jokes or a precursor to explaining why they prefer their client.
There seems to be a bit of miscommunication between mibbit and freenode here, where freenode believes that they tried extensively over at least a year to resolve this with mibbit and mibbit says they had no clue. I'd certainly be suspicious and not necessarily feel welcome to forgiving immediately if something like that happened.
And as for trust - I don't know either group. But from the patient way in which the freenode staffers explained what was happening and their rationale to everyone who entered #freenode to demand their mibbit back for (I think) the better part of twelve hours, that leaves me with far more respect for them than for axod at the moment, assuming certain things about his actions fit together like it seems.
a contractual obligation is exactly the type of hassle I believe they are trying to avoid.
freenode deals with a lot of closed source and for profit projects, the idea that the ban is purely for those reasons is "very" far fetched.
the freenode admins have said multiple times that they will be happy to reverse their position as they have in the past
the entire problem seems to be down to a lack of communication between mibbit and freenode, and both sides have blamed each other for the miscommunication.
after witnessing axods attempt at communicating, and seeing freenode communicating find with a large number of other partners, Its fairly reasonable to assume axod needs to the communication issues sorted at his end.
Working with Mibbit clearly costs freenode time and resources that they would rather not spend. Since Mibbit makes money, perhaps you should consider entering into a contractual relationship to provide them with financial incentive and other guarantees, in exchange for their investment in supporting your service?
The 'abuse' reason I believe is a red herring. Abuse is easy enough to deal with, and them operating their own web client won't change how often people abuse using a web client.
The abuse from Mibbit has been the only reason (in months) that I've had to set myself as an operator and ban users. As a user, I don't feel this is a 'red herring'.
So, IMHO, a sad day for Freenode and all that they used to represent, but an opportunity to create a new haven for hackers.
I'm perfectly happy on Freenode, and our IRC channels are quite vibrant. I hope you can reach a resolution with the Freenode staff.