Welcome to OFTC!

The Open and Free Technology Community aims to provide stable and effective collaboration services to members of the community in any part of the world, while closely listening to their needs and desires.

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 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.

You can reach the OFTC IRC network by using a traditional IRC Client of choice, or by the WebChat that we provide. The webchat enables you to connect to the network and chat directly from within your browser.

If you have support requests regarding the operation of the network please stop by #oftc or email support@oftc.net

Connection Details:

• irc://irc.oftc.net:6667 (alternative ports: 6668-6670, 7000), IPv4 and IPv6
• ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697 for SSL (alternative port: 9999), IPv4 and IPv6. See CertFP for how to configure certificate-based NickServ identification
• For IPv6 connections, supply a flag in your client if your operating system’s preference isn’t IPv6
• If you need to force IPv4, connect to irc://irc4.oftc.net:6667
• or alternatively connect using our WebChat or use the boxes at the top of the page
• Use of Tor is permitted is generally allowed

We support SSL on all of our servers. The certificates are signed, indirectly, by SPI’s certification authority. You can get the root certificate at the SPI website under http://www.spi-inc.org/ca/spi-cacert.crt, and if you care you can verify it using the pgp-signed fingerprints. Alternatively, install a certificate collection (ca-certificates or similar names are common) that includes it.