A few days ago, a quarrel at Freenode made it clear once again how important the management of a domain name is. After all, it was the owner of the domain name who got Freenode into serious trouble.

Freenode, an online platform for open source, was caught in a storm a few days ago. The administrators of this community do their job on a voluntary basis and the servers for Freenode are sponsored by third parties.

A few years ago, Andrew Lee decided to establish Freenode Limited. This company was intended to enable and facilitate meetings of the managers of Freenode. For example, they could organize conferences. Freenode Limited was thus created to simplify things from an organizational point of view. The operators of Freenode did not become employees of Freenode Limited, nor did the servers on which Freenode ran came into the hands of Freenode Limited.

Over time, however, Adrew Lee began to interfere more and more with the day-to-day business. That wasn’t always to the liking of the rest of the community, but in the end Andrew Lee won the coup with one strategic move: he owned the domain names, which also allowed him to decide which servers to direct traffic for Freenode to.

The managers of Freenode backed down and decided to continue under a different name. They re-established the platform under the name libera.chat. They are now calling on the Freenode community to use this new platform.

All of this makes it once again painfully clear that the management of a domain name is more important than people often think.

Author

Comments are closed.