Caudium IRC network is born near September 2002 because of too much instability of Freenode network. We, Caudium developpers, wanted a stable network without any nagware or wallops that asked up some $$$.
Since the Caudium Group have some servers in the world we had the idea to create our own irc network mainly for our usage.

We use Hybrid Ircd a ircd daemon with some services deamon designed for it.
We have a irc hub based in France that host services as well and our little bot "Sugar" that you can see in #caudium channel.
We have nodes :

• AT : ircat.caudium.net
• FR : ircfr.caudium.net provided by KaZar
• HU : irchu.caudium.net
• UK : ircuk.caudium.net provided by SpeKa-NetWorks
• US : ircus.caudium.net provided by Grendel

All of theses can be reached by Round Robin name : irc.caudium.net that is the best way to reach our IRC network.

Sure you can. The network is free to use but keep in mind this network is provided for work purpose, not for playing and eat bandwith. If you work on something related with Caudium, then feel free to use it.
Just keep in mind that this network is working on fund of some members of the Caudium Group and should be use only for work, collaborative work or to help open source projects only.

Yes sure. You can always help us, by be on the network, report us problems and even propose to be a leaf of our IRC network. Just join us in #caudium channel and ask for IRC network operators.... :)