Re: [gentoo-project] Libera migration summary

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, May 23, 2021 at 12:41 PM John Helmert III <ajak@g.o> wrote:
>
> I am somewhat struggling to see a difference between the Freenode of
> "yesterday" and the Libera of today. Organizations tend to be the sum of
> their parts, in this case it's people. They've proven they're capable of
> running Freenode for a long time, I see no reason they wouldn't be able
> to do the same with a network of another name.

I tend to agree.  I don't think that the former Freenode volunteers
are super-entwined in Gentoo, but I can sympathize as we are a similar
sort of entirely-volunteer-driven organization.

If some outside organization were to sue the Gentoo Foundation, win
the lawsuit, and be awarded the Gentoo trademark/etc, and suddenly we
find somebody taking over our DNS, infra, and so on, and telling us
we're welcome to stick around if we just follow the rules, I imagine
that most of us would see Gentoo being about the community and not the
name and some particular pieces of server hardware.  Gentoo might have
to live on under another name, but it would still be Gentoo in spirit
if the community moves.

I also think this just reflects the risks when you depend on outside
organizations.  The new Libera staff may very well run into another
issue like this be in next year or in another 15 years, and we'll just
have to deal with that when it happens.  While I actually wouldn't
mind ditching IRC at some point, simply switching IRC networks isn't
actually all that difficult to do technically - you just have to
change some DNS names in a couple of services/etc.  Maybe next time it
will be the Gentoo Twitter account that gets taken over due to some
change in Twitter policy, or our Reddit site, or whatever.  We can't
control these services and people need to do a reality check if it
looks like they might have gotten taken over - that isn't a reason to
never use outside social media/etc.  It is just an argument for
remembering how the cloud works.

-- 
Rich