I am surprised that NTP project is not funded, fully or partially, by larger organizations or governments, given the criticality of the project.
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Really? The sentence at the top of the Donate page seems pretty clear to me:
> Your donation helps Network Time Foundation maintain the NTP website and provide resources and support to NTP developers.
Is it unclear to you?
https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94...
But..it's $1k. This is basically pocket change on an institutional level. I've been part of some very scrappy and poorly funded community organizations and even they took in more than $1k every year. Even if you don't believe NTP maintainers should be paid anything for their work (an opinion I don't hold), it's trivial to spend this amount on modest everyday expenses like renting a venue a couple of times, buying insurance, and paying for hosting and technical resources.
EDIT: Here is their 2024 tax return
https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf
It looks like they took in more than $200k and spent $100k on "contract services" (I can't tell what that means) and somewhat modest amounts on other things. Unfortunately I need to exit the rabbit hole now.
How much more clear can they reasonably be?
It seems a big waste of effort to maintain -say- a damnable Trello board with upcoming priorities and roadmaps <strike>and Kickstarter stretch goals</strike> when their bug tracker and mailing list are visible to the public. (Though, it seems that they've recently put the list behind some broken moderation software, so you have to go to -say- the IETF's archive of the thing to read it. "AI" crawlers ruin everything.)
EDIT: Do note that that tax return you found is for the Network Time Foundation, not the NTP Project. I don't know if the two are separate entities for tax purposes, but do note that the NTF supports several projects, of which the NTP Project is one. The NTP Project is just for NTP.