Moving on

I'm the head coder of UnrealIRCd, an Open Source IRC server written in C. I've been involved with this project since 2001 and maintainer of the stable branch since 2005.

TL;DR quick links: My free modules have been moved and Note to commercial users.

About IRC

If you don't know IRC: it's one of the oldest methods for people to chat. You connect to an IRC server and join a specific chatroom such as #cats or #amsterdam and you can chat with like-minded people. IRC is still alive today and UnrealIRCd is still the most deployed IRC server.

A new focus

Starting 2017 I will focus on my career in cyber security. I've therefore stopped my commercial UnrealIRCd activities such as custom coding and selling add-ons (modules). I still plan to contribute serious amounts of free time to UnrealIRCd development, but not so much as before.

My past two years at UnrealIRCd

The past two years have been insane. I've been spending over 1000 hours in total on getting UnrealIRCd 4 production ready. Not just C coding, but also writing documentation, testing, etc. This all costed a lot of time, all of which I invested for free. I'm pleased with the result, though, and the positive reactions from the community. UnrealIRCd 4 is now a mature product and the old series, UnrealIRCd 3.2.x, have been retired.

Future of UnrealIRCd

I don't plan to invest the same amount of free time on UnrealIRCd coding in 2017. Still, I'm sure I'll spend a few hundred hours or so. That being said, it would certainly be helpful if some more coders would step in to aid development.

Looking for my free modules?

I've moved all my free modules over to UnrealIRCd itself. UnrealIRCd 4.0.10 and up contain all modules I wrote or maintained until now. For end-users this only makes things more simply: you don't need to download or compile any additional software anymore. See the  UnrealIRCd 4.0.10-rc2 release announcement for more information.

Note to commercial users

If I wrote a module for you or you bought an existing one then with regards to existing functionality don't worry too much. If the module is still under warranty then I will fix bugs for free. If your module is out of warranty then I can still do bug fixes or can convert the module from 3.2.x to 4.x but I will ask a fee for it. The most important thing is that I won't be custom coding new features anymore.

UPDATE for UnrealIRCd 5: I also offer existing commercial users to update the modules from 4.x to 5.x for a small fee. Just contact me at [email protected].