So he forked the project and went his own way. I am not sure I see the issue here. This is how we do open source on the internet. You don't have to join him, but he also has the right to go his own way too.
So he forked the project and went his own way. I am not sure I see the issue here. This is how we do open source on the internet. You don't have to join him, but he also has the right to go his own way too.
You're getting this wrong.
He has forked the project (to something that does not share the same goals so "fork" is arguable here), took the name, the cash and the goodwill.
We went from "we have enough donations/donators" to "how do we pay for the upcoming AWS bill?".
As someone who has been fairly active on the "old freenet", I have never cared about money nor funding... but I cannot help but notice that some has likely been misappropriated. Things like the SUMA award (https://web.archive.org/web/20150320201527/http://suma-award...) were awarded specifically for "protection against surveillance and censorship" that the "new freenet" does not even aim to provide.
"The board" of the non-profit seems to have been culled just before the decision. I don't know why, I wasn't on it. Maybe @agl can shime in (he was).
All I know is that this could have been handled better. It's what I wrote back then on https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5527...
> to something that does not share the same goals so "fork" is arguable here
How do the goals differ, specifically?
> but I cannot help but notice that some has likely been misappropriated
You had no visibility into the project's finances, yet you're publicly implying financial impropriety without evidence.
I've raised substantially more funding for the new Freenet in the past 5 years than was raised during the entire prior 20-year history of the project.
> were awarded specifically for "protection against surveillance and censorship" that the "new freenet" does not even aim to provide.
In what way does a decentralized network with optional anonymity not protect against surveillance and censorship?
> "The board" of the non-profit seems to have been culled just before the decision. I don't know why, I wasn't on it. Maybe @agl can shime in (he was).
You also acknowledge here that you don't know what happened. Those board members' departures were at their request because they were no longer actively involved in the project.
> All I know is that this could have been handled better.
I'm sure you're right about that. But my experience at the time was that the disagreement was fundamentally about the outcome, not the process.
You make claims. Release the books, and people can then verify what you say. If you do not release the books, it is only natural for many people to suspect something wrong.
It isn't "natural" to make baseless accusations based on zero evidence.
Of course there is. Anyone is completely justified in asking what their politicians do, how their non-profits spend their money, or what ever.
The fact that evidence is not provided, if anything, is an indication of potential wrong doing.
I also note that you did not actually respond to what I said. This is additional indication of some potential wrong doing.
> The fact that evidence is not provided, if anything, is an indication of potential wrong doing.
No, that's not how evidence works.
You're starting from the assumption of wrongdoing and then treating the lack of evidence as confirmation of your suspicion.
Meanwhile we've spent the last 5 years publicly building a working decentralized platform.
The issue is that the original name, "Freenet", was repurposed for a different codebase.
Different codebase, same purpose.
This isn't even the first time we did a ground-up redesign/rewrite of the Freenet codebase, we did this in 2008 with the 0.7 release.
Neither of you get to be freenet, another project with the name predated it by a lot. and throughout the 90s many ISPs were named $PLACENAME_freenet
https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/cleveland-freenet
Repeating a bad decision does not make it any wiser.
History will be the judge, and so far it's looking very promising given our progress.
What does your progress have to do with the name? You're so defensive that you're reasoning with non sequiturs.
What would your success metric be for whether reusing the name was the right decision?
Community size and positive community feedback, which is somewhat tangential to progress, which I assume is in the context of development. Also, the rate at which the original freenet community declines.
Number of contributors or pull requests isn't a good metric at the moment since the advent of Claude Code et al. has seen a dramatic uptick in both everywhere.
How is it tangential? Technical success is the primary driver of community growth, adoption, and long-term viability. The more it can do, and the better it does it, the more people will use it.
Community growth might imply technical success (debatable), but technical success does not imply community growth.
You can have a very technically successful project, but it doesn't mean it'll be used.
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Should've called the new one Freenet 2 or Freenet NT.
Freenet 3.11 for Workgroups
Freenet++
No komrade...