He didn’t bother to remove his sick accusations even after Rob died !

Here’s a comment I left in his blog post in case it’s not approved by him :

Well done ! You’ve accomplished your mission ! Rob has finally left Freenode.

Permanently.

Leaving a wife and a disabled kid in a very poor financial situation.

Happy now ?

Patrick McFarland is the worst.
We need to stand up to these bullies.

I’ll be donating monthly to Rob’s family through Paypal. Let us all do the same.

Very rarely does Rob actually do any actual work. I’d think more of Rob if he’d pay the volunteers instead of letting them do this for free. If it wern’t for the volunteers, there wouldnt be a Freenode.

I think it’s unfair to say that Rob “[does] nothing in return.” The fact that Freenode runs as smoothly as it does is testament to the fact that he and the other volunteers are doing whatever is necessary to keep things going.

I’m not trying to raise Rob to sainthood: I know he’s made plenty of mistakes over the years. I do believe they are mistakes, not genuine attempts of profiteering off Freenode or some other greedy motive. He tries to do as much for Freenode with as little as he has and that’s not easy.

If your issue with Rob is that he’s made mistakes, then we’re in agreement. If you think that Rob is accepting donations and providing no value in return, I think you need to take a closer look at the situation. You’re not being very objective about the matter and that’s not fair to Rob, who is trying really hard to support a community (Freenode) and is having relative success doing it. That doesn’t all just happen by doing nothing.

As for “my agenda,” what agenda? The only agenda I have is to stop people from abusing the FOSS community for thier own gains, and I believe that is what Rob is doing.

And as for me using Debian for my “crusade”, no, Debian left Freenode of their own accord, with little or no input from me. They had threatened to move two or so years ago when Rob had done his original fund raiser where he posted global notices constantly asking for donations, and Rob curtailed those constant global notices under their threat of moving.

As such, Debian left for the same reasons I do what I do: Rob likes to take donations and do nothing in return. And on my blog, I stated as much.

His character is flawed, immature, zealous, and mean spirited. It is highly unfair to attack Rob Levin, or his family for reaching out to the community for voluntary donations. Even the freenode donations are purely voluntary. Its quite disturbing to see someone in a free and open community using any tactic to further their own agenda. This is not the last of my visits on this subject. I intend to to pursue this to the fullest of my abilities.

I joined #debian and asked those in charge there if they knew that McFarland was using the recent move of thier bot out of context, and recieved some encouraging signals.

The debian folks did not know that McFarland was using their move to justify his own crusade.

They know now. Thanks for the good article. We should coordinate if he continues this evilness.