Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC)

The Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network which is particularly popular with the free software community, 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. The Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) is a member project of Software in the Public Interest (SPI), a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.

History
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 IRC network itself runs the oftc-ircd software, which is a branch (patchset) of Hybrid IRCd version 7. Notably, it supports IPv6 connections, and allows NickServ authentication using SSL client certificates.

Development
OFTC currently develops 3 projects for its purposes: oftc-hybrid (IRC daemon), oftc-ircservices (IRC services suite), and oftcdns (geoip dns responder to handle user distribution across servers). OFTC uses trac for its source browsing and bug tracking. There are publicly available tarball releases of all projects at OFTC releases. Developers contributing to the code base should read and be familiar with Subversion.