Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

It's sad that a project that literally every company in the world depends on is requiring donations to keep working.

I feel like a ~$10M/yr foundation to fund hundreds of the "Some Guy In Nebraska" people (https://xkcd.com/2347/) on a modest stipend would be easily worthwhile for any one of the tech giants, even understanding the free rider effect. Some of their thousands of engineers are being paid high six or seven figures, and every single minute of their time spent figuring out how some dependency has changed and broken compatibility adds up very quickly. Just paying them to sit on their hands and not let anything break by some kind of hostile takeover, like an intelligence agency quietly paying people to keep quiet.

It is apparently "Grossly Overestimate The Reliance of Companies on Open Software and Systems Week" and nobody told me.

Name one company that doesn't depend on NTP.

Perhaps it is just my career experience, but I have never worked at a company that 1) cared about the time and 2) did not have its own clocks and 3) would touch ntpd with a 10-foot pole.

This donation is for the NTP Foundation for something specific like their website.

The big companies who use NTP have their own pools and either use versions of different ntp implantations or their own internal ones.

All of these comments assuming cloud providers are using the reference NTP implementation and the public pools have no idea what they’re talking about.

It is sad that an unfounded comment like that can be posted so easily with no basis in fact.

> The big companies who use NTP have their own pools

And which NTP servers are those pools synchronized to?

Care to elaborate, or do you prefer to just say "nah fam thats cap" in a pretentious manner?

This organisation doesn't run the NTP pool.

They have their own Stratum 0 source clocks.

These large trillion dollar companies run their own NTP servers rather than depending on this one.