Freenode turns 10

To the Editors,

It's Freenode's birthday party.  We'd like to extend an invitation to your
readers to come celebrate with us.

A bit of history is in order.  In early August, 1994, a small IRC support
channel called #linuxneo, on the EFNet IRC network, began to see activity.
The channel grew, and in a few days its name was changed to #linpeople.  The
channel grew, and eventually moved to Undernet, then DALnet, and in late
1995 it became its own IRC network, irc.linpeople.org. By early 1998, its
focus began to broaden, from GNU/Linux to free software in general, and it
became irc.openprojects.net.  In August, 2002, the network changed its name
to irc.freenode.net as it became the first project of a new nonprofit
entity, Peer-Directed Projects Center.

Today, Freenode peaks at over 15,000 users, and we're home to coordination
channels for such projects as Debian GNU/Linux, fedora, Gentoo, KDE and
subversion.  We're the official IRC network of the Free Software
Foundation's GNU project; we provide support channels for FreeBSD, GNU/Linux
and a variety of free software applications.  But the real conceptual moment
when the network was born was early in 1994, on 29 January at 01:49 UTC,
when I first joined the channel #linuxneo.

So, happy birthday to us!  Ten years later to the minute, on 29 January 2004
at 01:49 UTC, the birthday party will begin in channel #linuxneo on
irc.freenode.net.  It'll last all day.  Grab an IRC client, get a little
<a href="http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircprimer.html">help</a> setting it
up, and come join us on <a href="http://freenode.net/">freenode</a>!

Sincerely yours,


Rob Levin
Head of Staff, freenode
Executive Director, PDPC