For those of us blissfully unaware of any drama, could someone fill us in? What was the "Dear GitHub"-style list of issues that they're talking about?

I wondered the same thing. I use freenode every day and wasn't aware of any drama at all.

I follow Freenode somewhat closely and I am not aware of any of that either.

I'm ex-staff (left long ago, still a chanop and regular user). Roughly, it seems like what happened was there was a disagreement over what freenode was supposed to be, a bunch of people resigned in frustration, there were a bunch of discussions, and everybody unresigned again on the principle that the future plans in the blog post were worth trying to bring about.

About the only reason it was worth mentioning the drama part in the blog post was that we'd been inundated with people asking about the resignations (since they were visible due to cloak changes), and now we're getting a fraction a many people asking about "what else aren't you telling us?", which is overall still a lot less annoying.

For anybody not directly involved in running the network, what'll be more interesting will be the changes made over time, which I'm not able to predict but am looking forward to watching.

Freenode is the place I go to once googling has failed but before raising a question on stackoverflow.

Often you'll be able to speak directly to a dev or a knowledgeable user of an opensource project.

IRC/freenode - an important arrow in your problem solving quiver.

Thanks for the vague announcement that you had some internal drama? Even as a user of freenode I have no idea what anything in this post is referring to. Maybe something happened that I might need to know about? Apparently there's going to be some sort of changes in the future, but to what?

I'm not able to locate any information on the "rash of high-profile staff resignations." Is anyone able to fill in some context here?

This is an example of an inside view "I see drama everywhere!" swamping an outside view "Freenode is up, ok."

One of the early lessons I needed to learn as a manager, is that my inside view is just one view. Getting the view of others is much more valuable.

Editorial: there's a typo in the submission's title, an 'r' has been made into an 'e'. The name is of course Freenode, not Feeenode.

Makes it sound like it has something to do with http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/. :)

I worked with Rob Levin at Linuxcare. It's nice to see his creation continues. It has a lot of good open source comunities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Rob_Levin

Is it really that hard to run an IRC network?

(I say this with experience running infrastructure for an IRC network, albeit orders of magnitude smaller)