Open and Free Technology Community
 | |
| Founded | 2001 |
|---|---|
| Geographic location | Europe United States |
| Executive board | Timothy J. Fontaine David Graham Peter Palfrader Stuart Walsh Joerg Jaspert Neil McGovern Scott Bender Christoph Berg |
| Website URL | www.oftc.net |
| Primary DNS | irc.oftc.net |
| Average users | 5,000 - 6,000 |
| Average channels | 1,500 - 1,600 |
| Average servers | 21 |
| Content/subject | Public/Unrestricted |
The Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network which provides collaboration services to members of the free software community in any part of the world. OFTC is a member project of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. Their servers are all accessible from the domain name irc.oftc.net. OFTC currently has 32 volunteer staff members, and 21 sponsors[1].
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 (SPI) in July 2002, and SPI became the legal owner of the project's domain names.
Coding Projects
OFTC currently develops 3 projects for its purposes: oftc-hybrid our IRC daemon, oftc-ircservices our IRC services suite, and oftc-oftcdns a geoip dns responder to handle user distribution across our servers. OFTC uses Trac for its source browsing and bug tracking. Prospective users of the software can find tarball releases at http://www.oftc.net/releases/. Developers contributing to the code base should read and be familiar with Subversion.
IRCd
OFTC runs the oftc-hybrid software, which is a branch (patchset) of ircd-hybrid version 7. Notably, it supports IPv6 connections, SSL connections (certificates are signed, indirectly, by Software in the Public Interest's (SPI) certification authority), and supports CertFP which allows NickServ services authentication using SSL client certificates. In the repository, /trunk is where the next version of oftc-hybrid is being developed. The version that is currently in use on the network can be found in /branches/oftc-hybrid-1.5. Users and developers can browse source, submit, and view bugs at http://trac.oftc.net/projects/oftc-hybrid.
Services
OFTC created a new suite of services based on the core of hybrid-services to ease integration into our network. In the repository, /trunk tracks our new features, while /branches/oftc-ircservices-1.0 tracks the current version linked into the network. Users and developers can browse source, submit and view bugs at http://trac.oftc.net/projects/oftc-ircservices.
DNS
OFTC uses a system based on Python and twistd-names to manage even distribution among its IRC network based on geoip location and server and network statistics. Users and developers can browse source, submit and view bugs at http://trac.oftc.net/projects/oftc-tools.