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

(www.ntp.org)
299 points gastonmorixe | 7 comments | 12 Nov 25 07:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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juliusceasar ◴[12 Nov 25 13:00 UTC] No.45899605[source]▶
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.

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1. hosteur ◴[12 Nov 25 13:25 UTC] No.45899843[source]▶
> 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.

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2. qwertytyyuu ◴[12 Nov 25 13:42 UTC] No.45900057[source]▶
It would be so much cheaper for the companies to support this than out their own solution
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3. gjvc ◴[12 Nov 25 13:44 UTC] No.45900082[source]▶
but then they wouldn't own it.
4. foofoo12 ◴[12 Nov 25 13:45 UTC] No.45900100[source]▶
You're missing the bigger picture. Vendor lock in.
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5. throwaway838112 ◴[12 Nov 25 13:51 UTC] No.45900175{3}[source]▶
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.
6. Aurornis ◴[12 Nov 25 14:08 UTC] No.45900367[source]▶
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.

7. everforward ◴[12 Nov 25 15:48 UTC] No.45901602[source]▶
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.