The Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) is an
IRC
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...
network that provides collaboration services to members of the
free software community
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, ...
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. 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
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
and
free software
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...
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.
The ability for all users to connect using
Transport Layer Security
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over ...
was added in April 2016 with the use of
SSL certificates from the
Let's Encrypt certificate authority.
In 2016, OFTC was bridged to the
Matrix
Matrix (: matrices or matrixes) or MATRIX may refer to:
Science and mathematics
* Matrix (mathematics), a rectangular array of numbers, symbols or expressions
* Matrix (logic), part of a formula in prenex normal form
* Matrix (biology), the m ...
instant messaging network.
Projects
OFTC currently develops three projects for its purposes: "oftc-hybrid" (a fork of the Hybrid
IRC daemon), "oftc-ircservices" (the IRC services suite), and "oftc-geodns" (a
GeoIP DNS responder to handle user distribution across the servers).
OFTC uses
GitHub
GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
repositories to host its
codebase
In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code system files; thu ...
and
issue tracker.
Prospective users of the software can find tarball releases at https://www.oftc.net/releases/, named according to
semantic versioning.
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
*
*
*
{{Software in the Public Interest
IRC networks
Free software culture and documents
Tor onion services