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

[Aurornis]

This was submitted with a title that doesn’t match the page and is not even accurste (Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up) is not correct. This donation page is not for the public NTP pool. It’s for the NTP Project organization and their web page.

All of the angry comments from people who think NTP will stop working if the donation bar doesn’t get to $1000 are misinformed. Also note that the bar isn’t updating. It’s been stuck at $365 for myself and others despite donations coming in.

[dang]

Not sure what happened here—the submitter is a good contributor, so most likely it was a simple misunderstanding—but yeah, the title shouldn't have been editorialized (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

[jrmg]

You’re right, people are plainly commenting based on the title.

The goal has now mysteriously changed to a goal of $4000.

[phailhaus]

I see it at $2,130 fifteen minutes after your comment.

[gastonmorixe]

Oh wow. I’m sorry. I should have done more due diligence and a better title.

[mmmpetrichor]

I think maybe the title of this topic post is the main source of misinformation.

[Bender]

Rather than money one can donate NTP servers to the pool. [1] It can be a fun learning exercise in setting up a stable stratum-2 time server. One can create graphs from the optional logs.

Why bother? Many of the rabbit holes one could venture down in learning to set up a stable time server can also benefit application servers in terms of latency, responsiveness, learning how to get clients to share resources and so much more. Rather than trying to find cooperative stratum-1 servers, one can start by using each of the Google, Facebook and Apple public stratum-1 servers [2] to get started. They get beat up a lot but most of them are stable most of the time.

Ask your favorite LLM how to set up a public NTP server using NTPD or Chrony. For extra credit play with each of them.

[1] - https://www.ntppool.org/en/join.html

[2] - # grep -E "facebo|goog|appl" /etc/hosts

    17.253.16.253   time.apple.com
    129.134.28.123  time1.facebook.com
    129.134.29.123  time2.facebook.com
    129.134.25.123  time3.facebook.com
    129.134.26.123  time4.facebook.com
    129.134.27.123  time5.facebook.com
    216.239.35.0    time1.google.com
    216.239.35.4    time2.google.com
    216.239.35.8    time3.google.com
    216.239.35.12   time4.google.com

[tonyarkles]

One of the really nifty things about having a stratum-1 time server on-site (because... reasons) is those graphs. You can very readily see the subtle temperature-dependence of timing crystals. At the facility I was at there was a large cycle every day during the week and then smaller cycle on each weekend day. Our HVAC system didn't heat/cool the building as much on the weekend when no one was there so the temperature swing -> frequency swing was smaller.

Really drives home one of my favourite half-jokes: every sensor is a temperature sensor; some of them measure other things too.

[bigstrat2003]

Yep, I encourage everyone to do this (though don't ask an LLM, actually put effort into learning). It's easy and cheap to do. I have been running a server in the NTP pool on a Digital Ocean droplet for years now, costs me only $6 a month.

[dboreham]

We ran a public NTP server for many years. Then, details hazy, but I think there was a UDP amplification vulnerability that was exploited which upset our transit provider so we took it down. Might be fun to try again though.

[mhovd]

I am surprised that NTP project is not funded, fully or partially, by larger organizations or governments, given the criticality of the project.

[nickelpro]

The reference implementation, while historically important, has largely been displaced by more secure/performant implementations (ntpsec, chrony), or by in-house implementations (Amazon, Google).

Notably NTPd doesn't support leap-smear, which means those who absolutely must have monotonic time can't use it at all.

[simoncion]

The Network Time Foundation (which counts the NTP project among those it provides resources to) lists several corporate Members.

But yeah, critical infrastructure usually goes criminally underfunded.

[nubinetwork]

I figured they would be funded by NIST, but the way the US government has been pulling back funding for everything, it didn't surprise me that they need money. Much like Jimmy Wales, I bet if everyone donated 5 bucks they'd be in a much better spot.

[xigoi]

https://xkcd.com/2347/

[littlestymaar]

Large tech companies and free-riding critical internet commons, name a better duo.

[philipwhiuk]

Why is research into the protocol useful. Isn't it done?

[arccy]

It's not really clear why they need this money either?

[imglorp]

The project has been hungry for years.

There was a fork to clean up and secure the implementation: https://ntpsec.org and ideally they would combine forces.

Summarized here: https://lwn.net/Articles/713901

[tptacek]

Yeah the ntpsec story, not great. I don't believe they're taken especially seriously. There are people close to Harlan Stenn who believe the project is essentially fraudulent.

[jchw]

I tried to donate, but apparently I am not human:

> 1 error prohibited this submission from being saved:

> Looks like you are not a human

Good to know.

[autoexec]

I'm not sure why they'd try so hard to keep bots from paying them anyway. If someone wants to write a bot that constantly pays me good money I'm fine with that. I might rate limit it if the stream of payments coming in can't cover the cost of keeping the server from being DoS'd, but that's not going to inconvenience a human trying to submit a payment one time.

[landgenoot]

You are thinking to much in emoji's and emdashes.

[fghorow]

Yeah, I'm not a human either.

(Edited to add: that was from Safari. Chrome worked. YMMV.)

[zimpenfish]

Same - first time the requirement for first name + last name bounced me, the next two times reCAPTCHA bounced me. Gave up then.

[zelphirkalt]

I had similar trouble, back when I tried to donate to the Internet archive. Donation box would simply not let me donate. I even wrote them an e-mail and nothing changed half a year later, so I gave up.

Too bad that good projects mess their donations up by doing web BS.

[tomashubelbauer]

I wish when accepting donations, websites would stop caching the total collected amount or give it a super short TTL. I like to see the little progress bar get closer to the goal thanks to my couple of bucks.

[dspillett]

If they are only counting fully cleared funds, your payment might not be relevant yet. Some fraud checks are not synchronous, for instance.

Though they could fake it: take the current cleared total and add your amount for your display.

[pigbearpig]

Perhaps they don't have the funds to implement that feature.

[stego-tech]

Absolutely shameful that this project - and many, many others that underpin trillion-dollar tech company valuations - aren’t fully funded already by the major consumers.

I’d like to see more projects do a breakdown of total yearly costs (including contributor compensation!), how much existing sponsorships from companies actually cover, and what number they’d need to operate properly (with full-time, paid contributors).

[g-mork]

I'm not so sure, becoming dependent on corporate funding means importing corporate policy. Is it really necessary for a DEI policy being required to appear on ntp.org, or perhaps the sudden advocacy of some proprietary protocol crapware pushed into public use from out of nowhere? That's pretty much what tends to happen

Of course the same thing happens in reverse (see recent python.org refusal to accept federal funding)

[sathackr]

That seems very low for such a high profile site/project

I donated an amount but the bar didn't move and is at the same level($395) as before my donation

[sathackr]

If you follow the "Foundations work" link at the bottom, you're taken to another page that shows $4,675 of $11,000 November goal.

[Velocifyer]

The bar is still at $395. I am suspicious.

[juliusceasar]

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.

[Aurornis]

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.

[sph]

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.

[hosteur]

> 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.

[jillesvangurp]

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.

[jvanderbot]

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?

[kristopolous]

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.

[Barbing]

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

[jmclnx]

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.

[neuroelectron]

Trillion dollar companies run their own NTP servers

[foofoo12]

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

[throwaway838112]

Doing that punishes people who donated.

[alex_duf]

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

[jrm4]

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.

[baq]

they'll buy leftovers and take the thing private.

[clbrmbr]

The folks who run the public NTP pool really ought not to make it easier to pay them money to use it commercially.

I submitted a request for commercial use via their online form but never received a response.

[homebrewer]

It's mostly run by one guy with very limited time. On their forum, I've seen one vendor repeatedly asking for the vendor prefix for three years, only getting the response once, and never actually receiving the prefix.

[rnijveld]

As someone working on an NTP implementation (specifically ntpd-rs) I have to add some context to this: I do believe that donating to the Network Time Foundation is fine, but it is not required to keep the Network Time Protocol up in any way.

Firstly, the most important reason the ntp.org domain name is so well known is because of the NTP pool, which is an entirely separate project (the Network Time Foundation calls it an associated project), which was allowed to use the `pool.ntp.org` domain name, but does not directly receive significant funding from the Network Time Foundation as far as I understand (I do not know the details of the domain name arrangement). That pool project was developed independently of the Network Time Foundation and is run by a different group of volunteers, mostly being developed and maintained by Ask Bjørn Hansen and hosting servers entirely consisting of (sometimes professional) volunteer operators. This is what many NTP implementations, specifically many Linux distributions, use as their standard source of time. But it does not appear to depend much on the Network Time Foundation for continued existence.

Secondly, despite all the claims made on the Network Time Foundation site, the IETF took over development and maintenance of the NTP protocol for something like two decades now already under the NTP working group. This was all done with the Network Time Foundation fully agreeing this was the way forward. But for some reason they still consider themselves exempted from any process that the IETF uses and consider themselves as the true developers of the protocol. They constantly frustrate the processes that the IETF uses, claiming that they should receive special treatment as being the 'reference implementation'. Meanwhile, the IETF NTP WG does not have a concept of the reference implementation at all, instead considering all NTP implementations equal.

Aside from this frustrating stance, the Network Time Foundation also didn't do much work on trying to forward the standard at all, instead relying on the status quo from the late 90s and early 2000s. Meanwhile the IETF NTP WG worked on standardizing a way to secure NTP traffic (with regular NTP traffic being relatively easy to man in the middle, with older implementations even being so predictable that faking responses didn't even need reading the requests). That much more secure standard, NTS, was fully standardized in September of 2020, but the Network Time Foundation continues to not implement this standard. All of this has resulted in almost every Linux distribution that I know of replacing their ntpd implementation with NTPsec (with ntpd not even being available as an alternative anymore for installation).

Meanwhile people also started working on NTPv5, in order to remove some of the unsafe and badly defined parts of the standard, and in general bring the spec back up to date. As part of this process, it was decided some time ago that in contrast to the previous NTP standards, the algorithms specifying what a client should do in order to synchronize the time should be removed from the standard (the algorithms specified in the previous standards were not being used by any implementation, not even the ntpd implementation by the Network Time Foundation itself). NTPv5 instead focuses on the wire format of NTP packets and the simple interactions between parties. Yet despite there having been a consensus call on this, and despite no current implementation following the exact algorithm as specified in NTPv4, the Network Time Foundation continues to frustrate the process by claiming that these algorithms are an essential part of the standard.

All of this frustration was also a large part of why the PTP protocol was eventually developed at the IEEE. That is to say: even though the operating mode of PTP is often quite different to that of NTP these days, the information that needs to be transferred is essentially the same, and the packets could have trivially been defined to be the same as long as NTP had built in a little bit of additional flexibility a little bit earlier. This would have also helped NTP in the end (with for example hardware timestamping only being implemented for PTP right now, even though it could have been just as useful in NTP), and with PTP now also aiming to introduce a simpler client-server model via CSPTP that looks a whole lot like what NTP was trying to achieve all this time with its most used operating mode.

It is my belief that the Network Time Foundation continues to push themselves in a corner of more and more irrelevance even though that did not need to be. The historical significance of David Mills' ntpd implementation is definitely there, and we should applaud the initial efforts and their focus on keeping the protocol open and widely available. And I do believe that the current people at the Network Time Foundation could still provide more than enough valuable input in the standardization process, but they cannot claim anymore to be the sole developers of the NTP protocol. Times have changed, there are now multiple implementations with an equally valid claim. Especially with GNSS (specifically GPS) being under attack more and more these days, we need alternative ways of synchronizing computer clocks to a standard time in a secure way. NTP and NTS are perfectly positioned to take on that task and we need to make sure that we keep the standard up to date for our evolving world.

Edit: if you want something else to donate to, I would consider donating to the IETF, NTPsec, or maybe donating some time to the NTP pool. I would also link to donations for Chrony (one of the other major NTP server implementations) but they do not appear to offer anything. Linking to my own project's donation page does not seem fair considering the contents of this post.

[claar]

Here's his donation page for those curious: https://github.com/sponsors/pendulum-project

[jrmg]

This deserves to be somewhere other than at the bottom of the comments (where it is as I’m reading).

[47282847]

Confusing. On https://www.nwtime.org/ they use $11,000 as “November 2025 goal“, with $4,675 as current level?

Are these goals monthly goals, with the counter being reset? The sites don’t make that clear.

[Theodores]

So we have NTP begging to raise a grand yet we have hundreds of billions being spent on AI data centers.

NTP might not be able to generate AI cat videos full of hallucinations but it is a vital part of web infrastructure. The same can't be said about today's mega projects.

[bheadmaster]

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

[jeffbee]

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

[NetMageSCW]

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

[mapt]

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.

[calibas]

Some of the comments here seem overly negative and critical.

They support billions of devices and are only asking for $4,000 in donations per year.

[calibas]

Never mind, they keep upping the max every time they reach it. Now it's an $11,000 goal...

[NetMageSCW]

They support no devices. Read more carefully.

[marginalx]

The domain ntp.org is a very visible one, why not add a "Donors" page and say everyone who donates 250+ gets to show their company name as a sponsor on that page? This usually gets the attention of corporates and makes it easy to make the case internally as well, they all love to sponsor!

[knadh]

We've allocated $60,000 to NTP from FLOSS/fund [1]. It happened in May, but the disbursal is pending owing to paperwork [2]. We hope it'll go through in the next couple of months.

[1] https://floss.fund/projects/2025/

[2] https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#wha...

[VoidWhisperer]

The combination of the moving goalposts for donations (they changed it from $1000 goal to $4000 after hitting their goal[0]) and the fact that they have have a large donation like this pending but simply haven't completed the paperwork kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20251112110436/https://www.ntp.o...

[seb1204]

Why not just turn it off and say we need money to turn it in again?

[onion2k]

That might work, but the second order effect would probably be companies trying to do the work of time synchronisation themselves in case it happened again. That would lead to fragmentation and incompatibility.

[ramon156]

Turn what off?

[cpburns2009]

The GitHub sponsors page provides slightly more information than ntp.org and nwtime.org.

https://github.com/sponsors/nwtime

[Velocifyer]

Most NTP users use better implementations that NTPd (like chrony)

[gnarlouse]

I’m confused—why such a small donation amount?

[righthand]

Honestly the XSLT mocking and bad faith arguments have convinced me as an individual I shouldn’t care about technologies so much. If NTP is so important, one of the billion dollar corpos can foot the bill since they know best about what is valuable.

[jcalvinowens]

Meh. NTP is just an awkward less accurate frontend for GPS these days.

It's so easy to run your own NTP server. You can set up a pretty decent one using GPS PPS for like $200. My home ntp server is good for +/- 1us if you believe its ntpq stats...

This isn't like DNS. Everyone can run their own local NTP and that's fine. The only true shared infrastructure is the GPS constellation.

[almosthere]

it must be fake if it wanted 1k and now 4k. dont donate

[1970-01-01]

I hate to say it, but a number that low means ads are the answer. Even a YouTube video showing how to set up NTP would cover this cost if you recommend it to all users. Asking for money isn't respectable at this low number.

[emsign]

$1 Trillion for AI but we the people have to keep this foundation of the internet running. This is all one big shit show.

[NoSalt]

Ok Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. ... reach into those deeeeeeeep pockets of yours and fund something that I KNOW you use.

[dependency_2x]

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png

[lifestyleguru]

There are always money and resources in ad tech.

[NetMageSCW]

Except these are some (almost scammers) claiming to be a vital pillar but just pointing at the vital piece and saying they help with it.

[jacquesm]

They should just switch it off for a day or two, I don't think they'll have trouble getting funding after that.

[iberator]

PTP is way better than NTP, but it might be possible that reference time is somehow taken from NTP anyway.

What I Mean:

Reference .gov atomic clock (not radium one) -> NTP -> ? -> ? -> satellite control station -> gps -> PTP

Hahaha

[jhellan]

This is true when all network delays between the synchronized device and the time reference are deterministic and accounted for in the configuration. The design of PTP assumes that this is the case. NTP, on the other hand, estimates the network delays to its time references.

Is there any reason to believe that PTP would be better in normal networks?

[great_wubwub]

PTP is more precise so it's much harder to synchronize over long distances. Even in data centers it benefits from hop-by-hop participation from the routers involved.