Should Mozilla use Freenode for IRC communication?
by Al
By and large, the Mozilla community uses an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server operated by MoCo at irc.mozilla.org (IMO). For day to day operations, IMO is used by a variety of groups and projects for communication. For the people that I work most closely with, we use the server for release management of security releases and for overall quality assurance efforts. The development team uses it quite heavily for intercommunication in the #developers channel.
Much of the open source community uses Freenode for IRC communication. The entire Ubuntu project uses it. I know that the Python community uses it quite heavily. The local hackerspace, Noisebridge, even has a channel (#noisebridge). In fact, every project that I know of that has a public face on IRC uses Freenode except Mozilla projects.
Given the cross-group nature of open source, where people often participate in many projects depending on their interests, I really think that Mozilla should move to Freenode. The current situation with irc.mozilla.org feels like a semi-private walled garden. It is a public server, yes, but it is cut off from many of our natural allies. Let’s face it, people are fundamentally lazy in many ways and the extra work that it takes to join another IRC server when someone is already active on Freenode means that many people probably don’t bother to come to the Mozilla IRC server.
A while back, as part of my work in the Mozilla QA organization, I set up #mozilla-quality on Freenode and submitted the paperwork to reqister Mozilla QA as the owner of that channel. We don’t have a lot of people drop into the channel but we get a few irregularly, often looking for help. I have personally seen that when, in response to questions that they want to direct at developers, they are directed to irc.mozilla.org, most of them do not go to the directed channels on the server.
It would be quite easy to register ownership of “mozilla-” on Freenode and to move the bulk of IRC conversations to that network. I think it would be a win-win situation for working with community there and would make Mozilla a lot more accessible to others.
This is something that will probably need to be debated and discussed in newsgroups but I wanted to post something here before beginning that discussion in order to see what the readers of planet.mozilla.org felt about the matter. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.
Comments
I have to firstly answer your subject with a “no” and provide some reasons here (I may be prompted to write a full fledged post in response later of course).
Freenode, while used by much of the open source community seems resistant to openness with its server. For some reason, with the areas internet connectivity I’ve had little luck connecting and staying connected to freenode, port-scan issues initially due to me setting myself up to do locally host websites, have port forwarding on my router etc. I blocked what I definitely did not want through, but if it was “harmless” traffic, (after I made an outgoing connection) it was allowed to be READ by me, which blocked me initially from Freenode.
After I closed that gap, (and even changed network providers) it would time out on me shortly after connecting, NOT port-scan issues, after chatting with their tech team.
As far as against openness, many users who are behind secure firewalls, don’t use IRC clients, they choose to use Mibbit for its nice UI, server-side settings, etc. However freenode blocks mibbit, in favor of its own _JAVA_ based app on its website, that does not save ANY settings or preferences. To use it on their website you have to manually log in each time, manually ident, manually join the channels you want, etc.
Nevermind the procedural aspects of loosing control of blocking spammers, potential changes in Terms Of Use “we” (at Mozilla) have no control over. etc.
These are the primary reasons you don’t find me even attempting to connect to freenode [lately] unless I need to speak to a member of one of the open source projects there. Should freenode correct these issues I have then I may be prompted to give it further thought.
IFF the goal here is to bridge the gap and make less servers for open source community, why not have mozilla “bring on” the pressure of hosting, and invite (at least big-ticket) freenode groups to use mozilla’s system. It would require a larger IT burden but would likely also foster more cooperation between the groups as you say above.
As a MoCo employee:
IRC is an integral piece of our internal communication. I’ve had to deal with setting up IRC on both freenode and mozilla and dealing with 2 servers is somewhat of a headache. Thankfully, 99% of the time I only have to stay on irc.mozilla.org.
Unless there’s a solution to the “private” channels being hosted elsewhere, I would strongly prefer to keep irc.mozilla.org as the main chat server.
“In fact, every project that I know of that has a public face on IRC uses Freenode except Mozilla projects.”
You’re leaving out the entire GNOME project, which uses GIMPnet, and Debian, which uses OFTC. I’m sure there are others, too.
Freenode doesn’t even support SSL at all, so all communication could easily be intercepted via MITM means, including passwords and private communications. That in itself is completely unacceptable to any security-minded person. MoCo currently has a large number of private, secure channels on irc.mozilla.org, and it would be very unwise to move those to Freenode, so MoCo employees would likely have to be on two IRC networks just for day-to-day activities.
Freenode only permits joining a maximum of 20 channels. I, for one, am currently in 30 channels on irc.mozilla.org and another 17 on Freenode, so I would be forced to run multiple clients just to be able to be in all the existing channels I’m already in if they moved to Freenode.
Because it’s such a large network, Freenode experiences large amounts of spam and abuse, but since we wouldn’t control the network ourselves, we would have to rely on Freenode staff to handle all such issues, which would most likely result in such problems taking much longer to deal with compared to how quickly such issues are handled currently.
Also, if you’ve been on Freenode at all lately, their servers have been experiencing massive netsplits lately due to DDoS attacks. This disrupts communication making it very hard to Get Work Done(tm). However, on irc.mozilla.org, we rarely have such issues, and we have the infrastructure to protect against such problems very easily.
I could go on with Reasons Why Mozilla Should Not Swap To Freenode(tm) if you really want, but I hope I’ve made my point so far.
I agree with the problem you’ve identified, though I think your solution is a little bit throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If you join #sumo you’ll see a member called “lcp.” This is a bot that bridges the #sumo IRC channel with the main chatroom on the Live Chat server, which is definitely not IRC by any means. I think a similar bridge would be a good idea, especially if the traffic is as low as you say.
There are also solutions to make other parts easier to solve. Last I heard Firefox was going to start handling irc:// links, which eliminates the difference between joining a channel on one server vs joining a channel on another.
I also think it’s a bit flawed to base any conclusions on people asking for help (I assume you mean user support here). Some people just want to get help where they already are and they’re not even willing to go to support.mozilla.com, you can see this at work at Get Satisfaction.
I thought of a few more reasons while talking to people on IRC about this, so figured I’d share them here…
Since Mozilla doesn’t have any core contributors that are Freenode staffers, we would have to go through the Freenode staff for anything special like IP limit exceptions, which we use on a frequent basis, as we have a lot of people who connect from the same IP address.
By running our own network, we also have the ability to exempt people who may be wrongly banned by some automatic DNS blacklist. This would not be possible on Freenode without involving Freenode staff, which is another delay.
These are all just technical reasons. There are many political reasons not to use Freenode, too, which have to do with Freenode staff’s general attitude and how easily (or not) it is to get things done in a timely fashion, but I will not dive into them, as I believe the technical aspects of why this is a bad idea greatly outweigh anything else that I could ever possibly mention.
All these things just add _more_ work on people that really just want to get work done as quickly as possible. Why would we hurt our community like that by forcing such harsh things upon them?
Also, after asking around, it doesn’t seem like anybody actually asked the people who run irc.mozilla.org what the technical pros/cons would be before posting this publicly. Just for future reference, we can be reached at ircadmins [at] mozilla [dot] org or by dropping by #bmo on irc.mozilla.org. :)
Reed, it was suggested that there bean open discussion about this, so I started one. Obviously, people who work on irc.moziila.org are encouraged to contribute to this discussion.
This seems a rather bizarre suggestion since Firefox 3.5’s default web application to handle irc:// links is mibbit.com which is completely barred from connecting to Freenode.
Defaults can be changed, Mardeg…
Besides, it isn’t bizarre if you spend your day logged into both irc.mozilla.org and Freenode and have people asking you, on occasion, why Mozilla isn’t on Freenode.
Can changes to defaults be backported to 3.5 and now 3.6 branch which is almost out? I thought they only receive “stability and security updates”?
Well, it would be nice if Mozilla community members could just jump into #mercurial on freenode instead of a few people having to maintain #hg on irc.m.o. And I keep two separate screen sessions open for both IRC servers, but I spend way more time on freenode, and so sometimes I miss questions on the mozilla server because I can’t spend time there for a while.
Is it possible to link certain channels between the two networks?
The most important thing I miss in irc.mozilla.org are IRC loggers. I would be very happy if there will be a way to set-up logging to channels in order to show archives on our community channel webpage (which has, of course, embedded mibbit IRC client).
I strongly prefer keeping irc.mozilla.org with mozilla ircops and probably less lurkers than on freenode…
Its important to note that its not just MoCo projects/teams that use irc.mozilla.org – Songbird, Firebug, Thunderbird, Chatzilla, Processing JS, Instantbird, etc, etc. Not to mention the various social and regional channels.
fwiw, mibbit isn’t going away, as the issues that freenode has with mibbit would likely arise with any other webservice.
Just a note from a Red Hat employee who uses ejabberd’s mod_irc which doesn’t work with irc.mozilla.org (that’s certainly not a reason, just to note).
a) the argument that “we would have to be on two IRC servers” seems kind of arrogant to me. Anybody who is employed somewhere has to be on his company’s IRC/Jabber/whatever-else server as well as on the community servers.
b) wouldn’t be possible for irc.mozilla.org server to join Freenode network? I think it could help you with overloaded IP addresses etc. prolems.
I think you’ve identified a valid problem, but several people have listed good reasons by just shifting all the channels to Freenode might not be the wisest thing.
So what halfway houses are there?
1) Some form of bridging, as Lucy says. Can we invent a few standard-name channels on Freenode, such as mozilla-dev and mozilla-help (or mozilla-support?) and bridge them to irc.mozilla.org channels?
2) Or, can we create those channels and have people or bots in them who say to newcomers “Hi! Thanks for dropping by, but we’re actually over on irc.mozilla.org. Sorry if that causes inconvenience. Do pop in and see us.”
I definitely think that it would improve our relationships and integration with the rest of the free software community if we had a Freenode presence. But, much as I initially thought it was a good idea, now I’ve heard comments from reed and others I think a wholesale move may not be worth the disruption.
I don’t see the advantage.
The real awesome thing Freenode brings to the table is that it’s SAS. It’s instant setup and you’re up and running. Perfect for open source projects with little/no budget. Once you’re on, why move off unless you have specific needs?
Mozilla’s background is it had a budget (Netscape/AOL), then became profitable on it’s own. The need was never there.
As others have pointed out, irc.mozilla.org has many advantages including more control and security. Considering all the infrastructure already in place for Mozilla two IRC servers (I think there are two) isn’t much overhead. I doubt bandwidth is really hitting the bottom line either. So savings would be relatively small.
Regarding working with other projects… I’m not really sure how using the same IRC service would make ANY meaningful difference. If that’s really the barrier… there was never really any intent to work together anyway.
No, simply for the avoidance of spam bots and DCC requests. I know many folks use Colloquy, and in it’s current release has no option to block DCC requests.
It seems like a good start on dealing with the questions Al gets is to just have a page up explaining the technical/political issues with Freenode (the lack of SSL is a killer, in particular). Then when people ask why we’re not on Freenode we can point them to that page. Heck, this might convince Freenode to change their setup.
Another resounding “no” here. Freenode is simply too large – you have your near-constant netsplits, interruptions from global notices about stuff you really don’t care about, etc, etc. And then there’s the lack of SSL support and all the administration issues reed brought up.
Freenode is a good default for open source projects without the resources, knowledge or willingness to run their own IRC servers – I love it for existing, and am ever-present in a couple of channels there. But a migration there would be a huge step backward from a Mozilla perspective.
Lowering the barrier for communication is generally a good idea, but considering the pros and cons, especially the disruption for developers, and having to change all websites pointing to IRC-Channels, it seems like it’s not worth it. If the barrier is typing in “irc.mozilla.org” and hitting connect and people still shy away, it’s questionable how important that communication would have been in the first place. I regularly connect to project’s IRC servers like for Drupal to ask a question and I don’t even remember which server they are on.
Regarding support questions: I’m not sure we want to encourage people to seek support on IRC, leading them to support.mozilla.com would be a better idea.
If you have to go anywhere, go to OFTC. You could link your existing servers with their network so you’d still have some control. http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=OFTC lists some of the other projects that use OFTC.
Kadir, not everyone who wants to talk to us is running Firefox. :-)
Matěj,
“b) wouldn’t be possible for irc.mozilla.org server to join Freenode network? I think it could help you with overloaded IP addresses etc. prolems.”
Quoting from http://freenode.net/hosting_ircd.shtml, “however we don’t, as a general rule provide O-lines or operator privileges to our server hosts”, so, no, linking/hosting an IRC server on Mozilla’s infra to Freenode wouldn’t help those issues.
Even if it were possible to merge the Mozilla and Freenode network, it would mean _two_ changes of irc-daemon software, since Freenode is now using Hyperion, it is testing ircd-seven which is “someday” going to succeed it, and their respective server-to-server protocols are *not* compatible.
Then there would be surrendering all control to the Freenode operators, becoming subject to DDoS and frequent netsplits (which might quite conceivably become more frequent in a huge network). ATM, moznet seems quite adequately served by sand.m.o. in the USA and gravel.m.o. in Amsterdam. On freenode (and, yes, with Chatzilla I’m on moznet, freenode(production) and freenode(test) all at the same time with no unsurmountable problems) — on Freenode, the answer to /links fills half of my maximized chat window. It seems inevitable that there will always be a split at some point of that huge network. Earlier today, the only freenode(test) server to which I could reliably connect was located in Pennsylvania (I’m in Belgium) but it was split away from all other servers… Even NickServ couldn’t be reached from it.
No… no… FUCK NO!
There’s your answer.
Tristor (that’s right)