[Dismas]

There seems to be more to this than meets the eye. Hopefully we'll know more in the coming days, but I personally have a feeling that his family has ties to things on which the staff must disagree. Why else would the opers and users quit like that? I'll have to do some digging into this later.

I agree. Likely some form of disagreement, though I wouldn't be privy as I haven't used Freenode in 10 years.