Freenode

The big kerfuffle in the open source world this week surrounds the biggest IRC server operator, Freenode. Wherever the dust settles, myriad important open source projects use Freenode’s IRC servers for their main channel of user feedback, and a number of vibrant communities call or called Freenode home. What you would call a 3D printer, and most of the software that drives it, for instance, was brainstormed up in Freenode’s #reprap. If you want help with a Linux distribution, you’ll be set straight within a few minutes in the relevant channel, because the people who wrote, packaged, or maintain it are probably on Freenode waiting to chat.

But suppose Freenode burns to the ground tomorrow, as some are suggesting. So what? My take is that is doesn’t matter. Freenode doesn’t own IRC, setting up an IRC server is essentially trivial, and what’s really important is the online community — they can just pick up and move somewhere else with very little hassle.

This is not to say that we don’t all benefit from the diligence that Freenode’s volunteer administrators and operators have donated to the cause over the years. IRC servers don’t run themselves, and Freenode’s admins fought and won an epic battle with spammers a couple years back. Keeping IRC running at scale is a different thing than setting up something for your friends, and so the Freenode folks definitely deserve our thanks.

But look, IRC is an old protocol and it’s a simple protocol. It’s so simple, in fact, that writing an IRC bot is just a few dozen lines in Python, using no external libraries. All you need to do is send plain text over a socket. You can do this — it makes a great networking hello world.

IRC is fun for hackers, but if you want a user-friendly GUI client, you ridiculously many to choose from. There are even no-install web clients if you just want to dip your toes in. Heck, you could install your own server in an hour or so.

So saying that the demise of Freenode is the end of IRC is a lot like saying that the end of Hotmail was the end of e-mail. In the grand scheme of things, almost nobody actually uses IRC — Freenode has 78,000 users while Slack has 10 million — and IRC users are very savvy, if not full-on geeky. These are the sort of people who can probably find the server field in a menu and change it from irc.freenode.net to irc.whatever.org.

In addition to our traditional #hackaday channel on irc.freenode.net, there’s also a channel set up on irc.libera.chat as well. There isn’t much action in either — IRC tends to be a slow conversation, so don’t freak out if someone responds to you an hour later — but if you want to swing by, we’re there. IRC will never die!

2021 Hackaday Prize Begins!

If you missed our announcement, this year’s Hackaday Prize is on! We’ve all had a rough year and a half, and it’s lead a lot of us to think seriously about our world. How would you want to change it going forward? Fifty entrants will rethink, refresh, and rebuild their way into $500, and the Grand Prize is $25,000. Get hacking!

It’s no secret that Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has lost some of its appeal in recent years. These days there’s plenty of free chat platforms boasting slick web interfaces and smartphone push notifications, to say nothing of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The ability to communicate with like minded individuals from all over the planet in real-time is now something we take for granted, so it’s little surprise that newer and flashier protocols and services have steadily eroded the IRC user base.

But there’s often a hidden cost to using these more modern communication protocols. A lack of operational transparency naturally leads to concerns over monitoring and censorship, which makes such services a poor match for the free and open source community. As such, many open projects have eschewed these newer and more popular services for IRC networks that were developed and maintained by the community itself. Among these, the best-known and most respected is Freenode. Originally started as a Linux support channel in 1995, Freenode grew to become the defacto communication and support tool for free and open source projects of all shapes and sizes, and by 2013 had officially become the largest and most active IRC network in the world.

Unfortunately, the incredible legacy of Freenode is now being jeopardized by what former staff members are describing as nothing short of a hostile takeover. Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication. Here’s where it gets weird.

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