Project: Liberate Freenode, and I need your help!
Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 9:58 am17 people have dugg my earlier story (and if you haven’t, please do so). That means there are 17 people who also wish to see Freenode liberated, and the PDPC brought into the control of the Free and Open Source Software community.
Now I need your help. This is not a one man operation. I cannot do this alone!
Rob Levin continues to abuse the community for his own profit, and this helps no one; the community was not build upon these ideals, instead it was built on the sharing knowledge, resources, and information to build better software and development procedures, and to build a community dedicated to these ideals.
Not only does Rob Levin effectively steal from the community using the false trust he fostered within the community, I also believe he is commiting tax fraud, and other forms of fraud, by not properly reporting the earnings of the PDPC, and his salary as a board member.
He also owns two additional domains under the PDPC name, and is using PDPC to pay for them, but is otherwise not putting them into use, or are possibly using them for nefarious purposes. These domains are pdpc.us and peerprojects.org.
In addition to all of this, he is using his position as the head of Freenode to encourage people to donate to his Spinhome project. This project exists solely to provide him with an almost $250,000 motor home, and pay off over $31,000 of debts and bills. The PDPC nor Freenode profit from this in any way! The community also does not profit from this in any way!
If you’re willing to help liberate the Freenode IRC network, and its parent non-proft, the Peer Directed Projects Center, please contact me, either by leaving a comment on this entry, or by emailing me directly, pmcfarland@adterrasperaspera.com. Continue reading on how you can help.
What to do to help:
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The easiest of them all, is to boycott Freenode altogether, and stop using it until Rob Levin leaves the network or changes his ways. If you are the developer of a project and have a channel there, you can move it to the Open and Free Technology Community, and alternate IRC network dedicated to serve the FOSS community. There are also many other IRC networks.
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Report the Peer Directed Projects Center to the IRS for tax fraud. They have an easy to use form available.
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Ask
irc.debian.organdirc.gnu.orgto point to OFTC or some other alternative IRC network.
Hopefully, if everyone acts on this together, Freenode will be returned to the community that Rob Levin refuses to be apart of.
Andre, I wrote my final Liberate Freenode post a few days ago.
I have no clue what is going to happen, but I hope something good becomes of this.
I stumbled on this one rather late too.
Rob Levin has passed on. My best wishes go to his son and wife.
I am sort of wondering what will happen to the funds that have been raised. I would love to see the opening of closed commercial projects, as was the case with the Blender project, a while back.
More importantly, what will now happen to Freenode? Will it become what it should have been in the first place (What OFTC currently is), a network run by volunteers without any financial agenda?
If he forgot taxes, he screwed up somewhere. Unless hes actually trying to run this through PDPC, which, as its not a PDPC project, and is not helping PDPC, hes committing two types of fraud with one simple action.
However, I’m thinking he just forgot.
If he succeeds in raising the $312,000 and spends it, chances are the IRS will want near 30% of his income. He’ll need closer to $400,000 if he wants to buy his goodies and pay his taxes…
I’ve had my differences with lilo in the past, but I sure hope he doesn’t dig a $100k hole with the IRS for himself. Nobody deserves that.
I happened on this blog a bit late but in any case, Patrick you should emphasize that Rob Levin does not run freenode at all. The network runs on servers and uses bandwidth donated for free, hardware/OS maintenance is done by the IT staff of the server donor organisations, and the remaining tasks of direct IRC maintenance, if necessary at all (it’s mostly automated), are done by other volunteers for free as was the programming work.
I just wish people realised that Rob Levin does practically nothing for the network, and more importantly: Freenode would continue to run without any funding because running it involves no costs at all! “Running” an IRC network is a hobby and it is absurd to camouflage it as a profession.
The part I don’t understand is why people defend his behaviour. Is he that good of an actor that his feigned ‘neutrality’ actually suckers them? I have a good article I wrote prior to my leaving freenode a while back that you may be interested in at http://qreeves.blogspot.com/2006/04/rob-levins-feenode.html which shows his true nature. You’d be surprise how many people out there would support your cause, but simply don’t care anymore because they’ve would rather just give up and leave freenode.
Keep a good job up!
No, its closer to, “Egad! We have to fire this academic because he has a side project, and is using our university’s good name to confuse people into thinking this is a project of the university!”
This is like saying, “Egad! We have to fire this academic because he has a side project and is using our university’s good name toward his own personal side project!”
Spinhome sounds cool, and I’m grateful to Rob Levin for running FreeNode for all of us for these years. If he uses that name he’s earned as part of introducing himself for other projects and ventures, that’s not only okay with me, it’s perfectly logical.
[...] So, Rob has responded to my call to free Freenode, and bring it back into the control of the community, on his blog. [...]
I’m about to moderate three comments through (two of which are trackbacks/pingbacks). I’d like to mention, unlike Rob on either of his blogs, I actually use my blog to foster communication and discussion. Rob, however, deletes any comments that don’t agree with his view of the world.
So, Rob, where is that sense of Free Speech?
Thanks, Dossy Shiobara…
Dossy Shiobara kindly wrote this
entry
about the Spinhome Project on his blog. Dossy, I really appreciate it. Folks like
Patrick McFarland
are just an unavoidable part of doing my job. I’ve never quite understood the motivation…
Supporting Rob Levin is like supporting the PDPC…
Rob Levin, the founder of PDPC (the Peer-Directed Projects Center) blogs about being under attack from Patrick McFarland. You can read Patrick’s side here, where I left a comment. Since I’m concerned that the comment won’t be published, I want……
If you think raising funds to support Rob Levin through the Spinhome project doesn’t benefit PDPC, Freenode and their benefactors, then you aren’t smart enough to successfully “liberate” the Freenode IRC network and PDPC. Rob has contributed a good portion of his life, has sacrificed much, has been living close to the poverty level supporting a spouse and a young child on the generosity of the community, and has persevered much grief heaped upon him by others who haven’t even accomplished a small fraction of what Rob has already done. Supporting such a person to enable them to continue giving what he already gives selflessly is a win-win for everyone involved.
If you have real, tangible criticisms of PDPC and/or Freenode (or even Rob Levin, himself), I suggest you think them through and express them in an intelligible way. While everyone has their emotional moments, generally adults respond better to reasonable people more than they do to ad hominem attacks.
The way you are currently going about things will accomplish very little.