I'm part of LTM and starting to build up irc.com, along with founding kiwiirc.com.
I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.
As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.
What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.
Embrace Extend Extinguish, the root of Electronic Evils. Hopefully it doesn't happen with IRC as it has with other lovely parts of electronic history. Microsoft was the origin of the term with their browser and OS products of old, yet it has been unfortunately more and more relevant with Google, particularly email and android openness (gmail only features and Google play services, respectively).
That didn't really answer the question that was asked. IRC is an open protocol. Whats your fear?
There are some seriously paranoid people on HN these days, and it is rather disenchanting to have to sift through all the negativity. Failure to embrace new things and new ways of doing things is a surefire way to irrelevancy.
London Trust Media owns the networks where almost all users are, and either funds and closely works with most client developers, or directly employees those.
That’s the fear.
The IRC protocol isn’t great, nor worthy of protection. The users, the community are.
If tomorrow freenode and snoonet went down, IRC would be forever changed.
I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.
As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.
What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.