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

I refuse to donate. Trillion dollar companies depend leech on it and yet refuse to spend money on it.

Let it fail and see what happens.

Harsh but true. Any of the FAANGs could cough up a million dollars and let the thing run for 1000 months.

I’m too poor to have too much revenue that I need to donate some away to pay fewer taxes. That’s a problem corporations have.

Doing that punishes people who donated.

> Let it fail and see what happens.

It will get replaced by a proprietary protocol/paid service from each Azure, Cloudflare, Google, AWS, ...

The rest of us will be S.O.L.

How is not donating punishing those who do? Does not compute.

Ideologically pure, but for all practical purposes miserly. Trillion dollar companies are very hard to move that way and very unlikely to take the first step. We need a "Foundational Software and Services" fund that says very nice things about each donor and spends 100$ on publicity for every 1$ to software to even get them to start looking, I bet.

Donate some time: Ask your boss if their company could chip?

Even a single highly paid employee of a FAANG, many of whom frequent this very forum, could pay for a year without breaking the bank.

It's written clearly:

> Let it fail and see what happens.

I agree with you in this, I donate to a few Open Source Projects, I really cannot afford to donate to one that multi-billon $ companies use for free.

For example, OpenSSH. Used everywhere yet IBM gives a big fat 0 to that project even though OpenSSH is even used in AIX. Even though I love to complain about Microsoft, M/S does donate a decent amount to OpenSSH via OpenBSD, so M/S gets my respect for doing that.

Time companies like IBM steps up and give, if not, we are back to playing with CMOS date/time. Which is how things were when I started programing at a large company decades ago.

It would be so much cheaper for the companies to support this than out their own solution

but then they wouldn't own it.

They'd each fork it. AWS NTP for $0.01/request.

You're missing the bigger picture. Vendor lock in.

There's probably some stupid legal reason behind why they don't donate.

They would rather downvote you than giving away $100

Greed.

Anyone know whether NTP already asks the biggest names for donations?

100% true, but they shouldn't have to. If FAANG is using it, they should fund it. I don't want to work in a culture where the employees pay for the corporations' tools.

Not only that, but the owners of big companies are actively lobbying to pay even less taxes. They are ideologically opposed to supporting public benefit projects.

Trillion dollar companies run their own NTP servers

but do you want it to be dependent on trillion dollar companies?

This raises a lot of questions. Did they actually ask for money to these big companies? Did they get rejected?

Another approach could be to move this under the umbrella of any of the other OSS foundations. I can imagine the Linux Foundation would be a good place. Well funded, already has most of the stakeholders involved, and this clearly falls in their scope of interest at least. It would not surprise me if that wasn't discussed at some point.

This smells a bit like something that might be more complicated than it looks.

> I don't want to work in a culture where the employees pay for the corporations' tools.

Agreed. They call that 'open source' work (derogative)

Those trillion dollar companies are running a lot of public NTP server infrastructure. Here is a list of public NTP addresses from different big tech companies: https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94...

> Trillion dollar companies depend leech on it

Are you confusing the NTP Foundation (the group asking for donations) with NTP the protocol or the NTP software itself?

This donation request isn’t even for the public NTP pool. Read the donation page carefully.

The big companies you’re angry at are neither dependent upon nor leeching from this group. They run their own NTP infrastructure, which in some cases has their own developments and adjustments.

Google’s, for example, uses time-smearing to handle leaps. This is different than the standard and therefore you shouldn’t mix Google’s leap-smearing NTP system with NTP servers that don’t leap smear.

> Let it fail and see what happens.

This is a real “cut off your nose to spite your face” moment, but worse: Those public companies don’t depend on any of this. They provide their own server pools and in some cases develop their own software with their own advancements. Cheering for the NTP Foundation to fail because you think it will hurt big companies is very uninformed.

I'd happily donate to NTP if and only if AI companies are barred from using free software like this in the future via the sw license. I don't WANT to be part of this internet that's hostile and exploitative towards users anymore.

FYI the big companies provide their own NTP servers and pools. You can use them if you’d like.

They also don’t use the reference implementation (which is maintained by the group this donation is for). Your distros and software probably doesn’t use it either.

The commenter above who thinks shutting down the NTP Foundation will hurt FAANG because they “leech” off of NTP Foundation is completely uninformed.

Say this louder for the managers in the back!

I’m sick of having to pay for my own tools to do my job at your company. Either find a way to build using free tools or fork up the license for that Visual Studio Ultimate or IntelliJ Idea Ultimate license. Pay for your database vendor. Your corporate IdP. Why not $300/yr for a high value output employee?

This is one of those comment sections where it’s obvious that the angry comments aren’t coming from people who understand the topic.

AWS already provides their own time service and it’s both public and free https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/amazon-ti...

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. The trillion dollar companies not only run their own NTP servers but provide free public access to their pools

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/amazon-ti...

https://developers.google.com/time/

You know, I always thought it odd when plumbers (etc. tradesmen) working full time for a company have to supply their own tools.

I always found it odd that so many shops let people use whichever tools they want!

My brother is a plumber and his company reimbursed him for every tool he has bought for the job. After 5 years, he started his own plumbing business and he supplies all the tools, trucks, benefits, contracts, and customer support for his employees in the field. For what it’s worth.

You can choose your tool, you’ll get it.

Is there any endowment for such projects?

Something like money to the endowment from the big corp, then would be recipients petition the endowment for ongoing funding, some board decides based on a set of open protocols...

Because honestly I've seen this a bit recently - major infrastructure projects looking for effectively pocket change; a couple thousand.

They shouldn't ever have to beg for money, this is stupid.

We have a price for the total infrastructure spend per dev, and that includes things like AWS prices and all of the tooling like jira and github.

But you absolutely shouldn't have to pay for your own tools. (That said, blue collar people often have to, unlike us, and that's also awful.) But also, it's their productivity. If you are all laboring under the same constraints, it's their choice to make if they care about your productivity.

they'll buy leftovers and take the thing private.

You don't need to be dependent on trillion dollar time companies to get an extremely accurate time source. Just get your own GPS receiver that supports timing output. You can get an GPS-based NTP server for pretty cheap.

Wikimedia Foundation sort of does now. The result of that is that their spending has ballooned to hundreds of millions of dollars.

It would hurt the big companies though because the employees of those big companies rely on Ntp. It may not directly impact them but it’s better than letting them continue to rake in billions and then never support the core foundational tech.

Maybe letting Ntp fail will wake up some of the employees of other companies to the absolute sad state of the software world.

It also gives them power over how things are run. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

> Maybe letting Ntp fail will wake up some of the employees of other companies to the absolute sad state of the software world.

Big companies run their own NTP servers (which you can use for free) and do not use the reference implantation.

There is nothing to “fail” in this project which would cause big companies to have infrastructure problems.

The saddest state of the software world is that some people here have convinced themselves to cheer for this project to fail because they don’t understand that big companies do not depend on this project that is asking for donations.

From the previous comment.

> Google’s, for example, uses time-smearing to handle leaps. This is different than the standard and therefore you shouldn’t mix Google’s leap-smearing NTP system with NTP servers that don’t leap smear.

So we can use or not?

If we can then well good, then there will be no problem then if the funding fails.

> If we can then well good, then there will be no problem then if the funding fails

The funding is not for the NTP servers or pools. Please read the actual page and all of the comments trying to explain that the HN title is a lie. NTP will not “go down” if this project fails.

You can use Google or Amazon’s NTP servers if you’d like. Just be aware of how they represent leap seconds differently.

Because it is factually wrong, which would have taken seconds to discover.

Nothing will happen, so all of that is nonsense.

Yeah, sure, but in many places (for example in my country) they do not work for a company. They are not even legally working for themselves. You call them, they do the job, then ask for money. That's it. I think this is illegal though, but happens a lot when it comes to anything handyman-ish.

I think we ought to buckle up because it only seems to be getting worse, quickly.

I would be interesting in hearing more about this. There are legal reasons for a large company not donating to FOSS?

This seems incredibly unlikely. They all want clients to have accurate time, because it underpins things like sessions and TLS certs. It would also almost certainly be trivial to proxy back to regular NTP.

Even if the NTP pool somehow died, all it takes to make your own Stratum 1 NTP service is a GPS chip. An old phone probably makes a great small-scale NTP server, or an ESP32 with a GPS chip attached. 20 years ago it would have required exotic parts, but they're mundane, cheap and omnipresent these days.

soon enough you'll start charging people for source code and distribution.

Maybe building the world on open source software was not good idea

I've had an inexpensive GPS antenna "puck" on my roof attached to a 2nd or 3rd gen raspberry pi inside, providing accurate time to my home for over a decade. This is a sub-$100 project and very fun.

leap seconds are deprecated

The deprecation isn't effective until 2035, leap seconds will still be inserted until then.

Wow. I mean, I imagine that this would be a hard thing for trillion dollar companies to somehow enshittify;

and still, I'd never put it past them to figure out something that I haven't.

I reflexively donate a little to things like this and I think everyone else should to.

> You can choose your tool, you’ll get it.

That's actually decent. Too often you're stuck with whatever gear your shop uses - Bosch, Hilti, Makita are the most common power tools here in Germany. It makes sense for the penny pinchers who purchase on volume and get discounts, but chances are high it ends up pissing off the employees rather sooner than later.

You’re just validating my reasons to not donate which is what this discussion is about. It’s not about the way Ntp specifically works or what the money will go to. My reasons for not donating are that bad acting corpos have destroyed any reason or trust to support these smaller outfits whether directly impactful or not.

Oops, s/interesting/interested.