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.
Please feel free to join OFTC by pointing your IRC Client to one of the following:
irc://irc6.oftc.net:6667 for IPV6 connections
- SSL is enabled on all servers, the port for connecting is 6697.
If you're unable to connect via the default ports please use one of the alternate ports: for normal unencrypted connections use ports 6668-6670 or port 7000, for SSL encrypted connections use port 9999.
News
2008
- June
We are slowly rotating our server certificates (we do support SSL on all our servers). The new certs will be signed, indirectly, by SPI's certification authority. You can get the root certificate at the SPI website under http://www.spi-inc.org/secretary/spi-cacert.crt, and if you care you can verify it using the pgp-signed fingerprints.
2007
- November
OFTC enabled a new feature, NickServ auto-identification using SSL connections and client certificates. For more information about this feature please look at NickServ/CertFP.
- October
- We've completed our 2007 elections, congratulations to our new Chair (weasel) and Ombudsman (cdlu)
- May
In the news, http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/2037231 is an article discussing our cooperation with Freenode
OFTC has rolled out its new services (NickServ, ChanServ, ...) into production. Thanks to all who have helped us test it on our test network beforehand; if you find oddities, please report them in #oftc. Thanks.
- March
OFTC is live-testing its new services package. We are currently testing the new NickServ which has been loaded with a snapshot of the services database as of today. It can be accessed by /msg NickServ_Test instead of the usual /msg NickServ. If you get stray messages from this service please do not worry as you do not have to communicate with it if you do not want to. However, if you wish to test the new NickServ, please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that the databases are not in sync and changes you make to the new NickServ may be reset at irregular intervals. If you wish to truly experiment with new services (and the new ChanServ) please connect to testnet.oftc.net on port 16667 and experiment on testnet. If you have any issues relating to this test, please join #oftc and discuss them there.
- February
- OFTC's first server with more than 1Mbps worth of bandwidth, nova.oftc.net, has officially been retired. Many thanks to all of those that made it happen, and our many users over the 5 1/2 great years of service!
OFTC is in preparation phase for a new services package. We would like to invite everyone to stresstest it and to add sugestions for Improvement on the ServicesPlan page.
2006
- October
The 2006 staff election is now over and counted. You can review the staff changes on the Staff page.
- August
- Welcome to our first official French server; cation is now in service. Thanks to ziga for sponsoring.
- July
- We are now testing v1.5 of OFTC's hybrid fork. Lots of new features and/or bugs to come!
- June
- irc.debian.org now points to the OFTC rotation, welcome Debian users and developers.
- April
- We moved our webpage (the little there was) to a wiki. Hopefully that will allow us to keep things more current and maybe add some real content.
We have two new servers, pluto and reticulum. Thanks to Bluelinux Internet and Ganneff respectively for sponsoring them.