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.