Open and Free Technology Community


The Open and Free Technology Community is an IRC network that provides collaboration services to members of the free software community in any part of the world. OFTC is an associated project of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. The network's servers are accessible via Round-robin DNS from the URL . As of October 2019, OFTC has 31 volunteer staff members, and 16 sponsors.

History

OFTC was founded at the end of 2001 by a group of experienced members of the open source and free software communities aiming to provide these communities with better communication, development, and support infrastructure. OFTC is ruled by a written constitution and the staff elect the officers among each other using a voting mechanism. OFTC became a member project of Software in the Public Interest in July 2002, and SPI became the legal owner of the project's domain names.
The ability for all users to connect using Transport Layer Security was added in April 2016 with the use of SSL certificates from the Let's Encrypt certificate authority.

Projects

OFTC currently develops 3 projects for its purposes: "oftc-hybrid", "oftc-ircservices", and "oftc-geodns". OFTC uses GitHub repositories to host its codebase and issue tracker. Prospective users of the software can find tarball releases at https://www.oftc.net/releases/, named according to semantic versioning. Developers contributing to the code base should read and be familiar with Subversion.