As far as I can tell "freenode" is a fairly blurry mix of:
The brand, including the DNS: that was passed on between people and then sold within the Freenode Limited company. If you have this you can point the blog and the network to whatever you want but you don't actually have an IRC network to point it to.
The servers: these are donated by various organizations and thus owned by each one. They could join any other IRC network tomorrow or just be turned off by any of those organizations.
The staff: all volunteers that apparently left in mass as they didn't like what was happening. As far as we know they don't have any employment contract with Freenode Limited.
The actual channel/nick data: this is what actually makes the network recognizable to anyone and it's quite unclear where that is and who owns it. Are the Nickserv/Chanserv servers separate and owned by a particular entity or just sharded/replicated across the donated servers?
That last bit seems to be the crucial one. The data is supposedly stored on those donated servers and was operated by that volunteer staff, so owning the DNS wouldn't give you too strong of a claim to it. But apparently the staff was indeed forced to hand the keys over on their way out and start from scratch instead of just standing up the same data on another DNS and doing a blockchain style split. Why this happened seems to be IRC drama. Exactly who has legal rights seems extremely muddy, both because we lack a lot of information, and because it's possibly a thorny issue even for a judge to adjudicate with full briefs. If you buy a DNS that points to a volunteer run network on donated servers do you now own the network that exists there and evolves over time?
> But apparently the staff was indeed forced to hand the keys over on their way out and start from scratch instead of just standing up the same data on another DNS and doing a blockchain style split. Why this happened seems to be IRC drama.
Well, no, not really. More likely the reason for this is that taking the database with them would have given Lee a reason to continue legally harassing and essentially bankrupting them.
I was unclear, sorry. I meant the reason the whole thing as it happened was IRC drama, not the specific point about not using the data. I agree that specifically most likely happened because a group of volunteers don't want to expose themselves to a bunch of litigation from a hostile party.
The brand, including the DNS: that was passed on between people and then sold within the Freenode Limited company. If you have this you can point the blog and the network to whatever you want but you don't actually have an IRC network to point it to.
The servers: these are donated by various organizations and thus owned by each one. They could join any other IRC network tomorrow or just be turned off by any of those organizations.
The staff: all volunteers that apparently left in mass as they didn't like what was happening. As far as we know they don't have any employment contract with Freenode Limited.
The actual channel/nick data: this is what actually makes the network recognizable to anyone and it's quite unclear where that is and who owns it. Are the Nickserv/Chanserv servers separate and owned by a particular entity or just sharded/replicated across the donated servers?
That last bit seems to be the crucial one. The data is supposedly stored on those donated servers and was operated by that volunteer staff, so owning the DNS wouldn't give you too strong of a claim to it. But apparently the staff was indeed forced to hand the keys over on their way out and start from scratch instead of just standing up the same data on another DNS and doing a blockchain style split. Why this happened seems to be IRC drama. Exactly who has legal rights seems extremely muddy, both because we lack a lot of information, and because it's possibly a thorny issue even for a judge to adjudicate with full briefs. If you buy a DNS that points to a volunteer run network on donated servers do you now own the network that exists there and evolves over time?