Mostly all of the volunteers did not support going into partnership with freenode. Thomas was one of the only ones who wanted it (and he only did it when mostly all of the tech team threatned to quit)
No implication that there wasn't also pushback internally was intended, my apologies for the fact that now I look at it again, my comment can clearly be read that way.
I kept to a generic 'they' because the communications in question were private so while I'm comfortable revealing they existed I felt keeping the description deliberately vague was only fair.
(source: I am a former volunteer at fosshost)