[kevindication]

Right, but just because you have a data type that can handle a date that far in the future does not imply that you have fixed your OS and supporting software to be able to handle the day when the system time rolls over.

[apaprocki]

Yes, it really just depends how much your software stack depends on the OS and higher level OS-related services. If your software is not coupled with other points of failure in OS user-land, then you really only need a single entry point to get network-sync'd 64-bit time_t and then everything else in the stack can be built around vocabulary data types such as these. These are the types that are transmitted in protocols, serialized to files, etc.