About the Network

You've reached freenode, a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center (PDPC). freenode provides discussion facilities for the Free and Open Source Software communities, for not-for-profit organizations and for related communities and organizations. In 1998, the network had about 200 users and less than 20 channels. Ten years down the line the network currently peaks at just under 60,000 users, freenode provides facilities to a variety of groups and organizations.

2009/2010 Fundraiser!

The 2009/2010 fundraiser is now underway, progress can be seen on the pie-chart on the left. Our fundraising goal for 2009/2010 is £7500.00, please dig deep, be generous and help us reach our target!

We would like to express our thanks to those individual donors and corporate sponsors who made the 2008/2009 fundraiser a massive success! In particular, Canonical Ltd (you know, the company behind Ubuntu, who generously donated £1700.00!).

After a 2+ year break in fundraising it was an overwhelming experience to see so many of you muck in to help us reach our goal! Your support is invaluable to us and I hope we can continue providing the FOSS communities with useful services for years to come!

Polite Notice to donors regarding renewals:
When you make a one-off donation, your donor cloak will expire after one year. We will attempt to make contact with you on freenode before disabling it, either by private message or MemoServ. This allows you to renew your donation should you wish to continue supporting the PDPC, or to request an unaffiliated or project cloak otherwise.

Should your donation automatically renew, or you manually renew it prior to the expiration date you will simply keep your existing cloak, or should you change levels, have it upgraded to reflect this.

Participants in last years fundraiser requested that in addition to the pie-chart detailing fundraising status, we consider putting up a graph to indicate which channels donors come from! You can find this graph on the left, and it will include channel details of those who list a channel with their donation, any other will be listed under 'Other'. We hope this is what you wanted to see, and we thank you for your support of the PDPC and the freenode network.

Have you checked out fossevents.org yet? It's designed to bring you a up to date list of events, barcamps, expos, lug meetings.. any event relevant to Free and Open Source Software, across the globe! Have a look for events near you, or list one if you know of one before us or you're involved in organising one!

Peer-Directed Projects Center is a not-for-profit organisation, limited by guarantee and incorporated in England and Wales. Your donations help keep us running.

If you're interested in looking around the network, please find a server and come see us, or have a look at our network policies and project news and philosophy.

freenode is run entirely by volunteers hailing from the wider FOSS communities which we serve. Our combined network staff and development base is made up of around 40 dedicated men and women. We can all be found in #freenode on the network, staff are all voiced and happy to help, or just have a chat with you about what we do and why we do it!

Call for Testers: We are currently in the process of testing our next-generation irc daemon, ircd-seven. The test network is currently running on testnet.freenode.net, port 9002 for normal connections or 9003 for SSL connections. This is a new server, sharing no code with the current software and all aspects of it need thorough testing. You can find us in #freenode on the testnet if interested in helping out! In addition to testers, we are also looking to expand our development team(s), if interested please do get in touch!

Welcome to freenode!