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NTP's Fate Hinges On "Father Time"
Esther Schindler writes In April, one of the open source code movement's first and biggest success stories, the Network Time Protocol, will reach a decision point, writes Charlie Babcock. At 30 years old, will NTP continue as the preeminent time synchronization system for Macs, Windows, and Linux computers and most servers on networks? Or will this protocol go into a decline marked by drastically slowed development, fewer bug fixes, and greater security risks for the computers that use it? The question hinges to a surprising degree on the personal finances of a 59-year-old technologist in Talent, Ore., named Harlan Stenn.
Here is an interesting interview with Harlan Stenn at the 2013 Google Summer of Code
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Apparently he is keeping 7 doctoral and post-doc students busy working on timestamps, noise and 'something' that he did not seem to have a firm grasp on
He also mentioned a need for admins, a webmail guy and people who want to do documentation
Having been handed projects after a leads retirement, I think that documentation may be the more pressing need
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Feeling grumpy?
From page 2 of the linked article:
Apple Macintosh computers and servers running OSX use NTP, and Stenn said Apple developers have called him for help on several NTP issues. In the last such incident, he said he delayed a patch to give Apple more time to prepare OS X for it. When they were ready, he applied the patch and asked "whether Apple could send a donation to the Network Time Foundation," Stenn recalled. "They said they would do their best to see that Apple throws some money our way." But it hasn't happened yet.
Apparently somebody is under the impression that OSX still uses it, unfortunately this is how the business majors deal withit:
"Everybody loves us," Stenn said. "But people with money say, 'We don't give to open source projects.'"
http://www.informationweek.com...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
It's just a computer. It only has to work. How hard can it be?
Wasn't that ridiculous
NTP is also not trivial due to among many other things the large amount of clock drift on a lot of motherboards. If you had an alarm clock that lost an hour in a week you would throw it away, but that's seen as acceptable even for some server boards. So then you fetch the time but it takes time for the signal to get to you, so the time is out of date by the time you get it - which then means trying to work out how long it takes for the time signal to get to you. There's plenty more after that.
And nobody is putting a gun to the corporations head to make them give money.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's not assholish and deserving of public shame.
NTP doesn't just 'return a string of numbers'.
No, sometimes it returns A lot of strings of numbers.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
So he patched for and worked with Apple and they said we'll see ?
The way he did this, it is probably difficult for the responsible person at Apple to actually pay him. He should have offered to do the work as a contractor, someone would have found money in a budget, and when he sends a bill for five days contracting work they pay the bill. That's how it works.
He seems to be asking for a donation to an open source project. How can someone at a commercial company put that in a budget? The financial guys say "is there any legal reason why we have to pay this money", the answer is no, so it won't get paid.
The timekeeping of openntpd is normally quite good, but there can be really large outliers (up to several 100 ms) which is totally unacceptable for most use cases. Not so much that the time is wrong by 100 ms (almost noone cares) but the fact that it slews the clock way fast/slow to get there messes up many things.
It also cannot correctly deliver time to other systems, as it claims to be way more accurate than it is.
Already done for the client part of the NTP: systemd-timesyncd
NTP is not GPL.
See http://www.ntp.org/copyright