Geographic location Europe
North America Primary DNS irc.oftc.net Average channels 1,700 - 1,800 | Website URL www.oftc.net Average users 8,000 | |
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Founded 2001; 16 years ago (2001) | ||
The Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) 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. Their servers are all accessible from the domain name irc.oftc.net. OFTC currently has 32 volunteer staff members, and 21 sponsors.
Contents
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.
Projects
OFTC currently develops 3 projects for its purposes: "oftc-hybrid", the IRC daemon, "oftc-ircservices", the IRC services suite, and "oftc-oftcdns", a GeoIP DNS responder to handle user distribution across the 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.