[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.

[throw0101d]

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

It should be noted that there currently exists no standard, technical or statutory, for how to do leap smearing. If an event happens and you need to tie your timestamped event logs to the 'greater reality' in some legally binding way there's (AIUI) no way to do that.

A few years ago there was a draft on the idea:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-stenn-ntp-leap-smear-...

And the currently-draft NTPv5 has something about:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ntp-ntpv5/

Though the flag simply says that the timescale is smeared and not (AFAICT) how it is being done.

See also perhaps RFC 8633 § 2.7.1:

    […]

    Operators who have legal obligations or other strong requirements to
    be synchronized with UTC or civil time SHOULD NOT use leap smearing
    because the distributed time cannot be guaranteed to be traceable to
    UTC during the smear interval.

    […]

    Any use of leap-smearing servers should be limited to within a
    single, well-controlled environment.  Leap smearing MUST NOT be used
    for public-facing NTP servers, as they will disagree with non-
    smearing servers (as well as UTC) during the leap smear interval, and
    there is no standardized way for a client to detect that a server is
    using leap smearing.  However, be aware that some public-facing
    servers may be configured this way in spite of this guidance.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8633/

[mananaysiempre]

> Those who absolutely must have monotonic time

... shouldn’t be using a Unix timestamp, or anything else that’s not a count of SI seconds elapsed since a fixed reference point, to begin with.

[tptacek]

Who's running ntpsec?

[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.

[NetMageSCW]

Except they aren’t critical infrastructure which is why no one supports them.

[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.

[NetMageSCW]

They need money because they aren’t important.

[xigoi]

https://xkcd.com/2347/

[alex1138]

Shoutouts to Nebraska

[littlestymaar]

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

[shaky-carrousel]

That would be easily solved by blocking from NTP any ip address belonging to a big tech corp that doesn't pony up.

[aembleton]

Itchy and Scratchy

[philipwhiuk]

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

[iamkonstantin]

We keep coming up with new ways to use it: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240011919

[junon]

Time is hard, time synchronization is arguably harder.

[saikia81]

The project isn't about research it's about creating a reference implementation

[jrmg]

Don’t think you deserve these downvotes. That was my reaction too. Perhaps they’re coming from people who believe that the money is to support running of time servers (which, to be fair, “Please donate to keep the Network Time Protocol up” certainly implies…)

I too would be interested in knowing what the Network Time Foundation is researching, and I think conversation about that is appropriate here. NTP certainly _seems_ like it’s been ‘good enough’ for decades to an uninformed observer, and discussing if and why it’s not would be interesting (and perhaps motivate donations!)

[arccy]

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

[simoncion]

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

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?