Subject: Context on the switch to OFTC IRC network

From: Carlo Landmeter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 May 2021 17:50:24 +0200

Dear Alpine community,

As of 2021-05-19 [1] Alpine Linux has changed IRC network from Freenode to OFTC.
As there have been many questions to why Alpine has made this change the Infra
Team would like to give a bit of context.

The Alpine Linux team (as most of the community) was already aware days before
this decision of struggles/issues within the Freenode organization. When
finally the split between members of the Freenode organization became apparent
(via service messages) we decided we should take action and relocate our
channels to a different, more "stable" network without the current drama. As we
do not know all the details regarding the conflict between both Freenode and
Libera staff, OFTC seemed the most safe/reliable way forward.

We are aware OFTC misses some features which are present on both Freenode and
Libera and we are sorry for those people that are affected by these limitations.
Our decision is purely based on a stable and known to be reliable network.

Everybody's free to use the network they would like to use, and for for this
reason we have also applied for a group registration on the Libera network to
protect our project, but the Alpine project will officially only use a single
network to support our community.

Alpine Linux Infra Team

1. https://alpinelinux.org/posts/Switching-to-OFTC.html