That's up to the admins to decide, and there's currently an ongoing discussion regarding this, which we'll post a notice for when it reaches a conclusion. We'll most likely be refunding the Barge owners in some way, but since the stock price of the ship is 500 millions (1 billion for the older SRPed Barges), we most likely will not be offering a full refund to those who've paid considerably higher prices (as the price of the ship goes up to 30 billions in the open market) for that ship to purchase it from another player rather than simply going for a SRPed Barge (which under the current system would've only cost them 250 millions), as that was simply their call, and not a restriction enforced by the team.

Furthermore, for the sake of transparency the following is the idea we're currently discussing as a Barge replacement within the dev team. It's not final yet, but currently the most likely option for implementation:

One of the current "gameplay gaps" is the lack of an open-use jumpship, which as a result forces factions with no access to capital ships to use oorply-IDed capitals from friendly/neutral factions to jump their ships. Since one of the recent additions to the next update is an open-use survey ship turning Barge into an open-use jumpship is currently being discussed. To make the ship available to all IDs it'd be classified as a Liner, but with a jumpdrive mount, a good number of docking modules, and reasonable defensive capabilities but no significant offensive capabilities. This will help retain the Barge's role as a "mobile facility" for those who've been RPing their Barges as such, and at the same time remove the problematic "supertransport" element from the mod while also solving the lack of an open-use jumpship.