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by hosteur 214 days ago
> 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.

3 comments

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.

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.

It would be so much cheaper for the companies to support this than out their own solution
You're missing the bigger picture. Vendor lock in.
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.
but then they wouldn't own it.