about

The history of free software is written in public. It happens on mailing lists and in commit logs, in working groups and in channels, in the long arguments where standards are hammered out and the quiet patches where bugs go to die. Most of it is never reported, and most of it never asked to be. freenode news exists because that work is worth witnessing.

The open world

Free and open source software is one of the great collaborative achievements of the age: a global commons built by people who chose to give their work away and to keep it open for everyone who came after. Open standards are the grammar of the internet, written by volunteers in the conviction that the infrastructure everyone depends on should belong to no one. This is not a niche. It is the foundation the modern world runs on, maintained and advanced in the open, every day, by people whose names most readers will never learn.

We believe that work deserves a record kept in the same spirit it is made: open, careful, and close to the source.

freenode

freenode has been a home for those communities since 1998. Before chat meant a product, IRC was the town square of free software: the place where a maintainer in one country and a contributor in another could meet in real time, where projects were coordinated, newcomers were mentored, and friendships and disagreements alike played out in plain text. For a generation of developers, a freenode channel was the first door into open source.

Networks change hands and communities move, but the idea freenode was built on has not aged: that the people building the open world deserve a commons of their own, owned by no platform, open to anyone willing to type /connect. freenode continues in that tradition.

This publication

freenode news is part of the same project: to keep the open world legible to the people who care about it. We cover the kernel and the standards bodies, the languages and the ledgers, the security fights and the governance ones, the places where the future is being decided in public by people doing the work.

It is produced and edited by freenode, and offered freely, in the spirit of the commons it reports on.

Take part

If you follow these communities and want to write, request a contributor account. For anything else, editorial is editor@freenode.net, tips go to the tip form, and corrections to the contact form.