> 1 error prohibited this submission from being saved:
> Looks like you are not a human
Good to know.
How do you know the cash you are using is not "blood money"? Come on.
You know what else costs money? When someone wants to give you money, and you misidentify them as a bot and refuse their money.
For those who does not handle these things: I am not sure on what processor Network Time Foundation is using, but Stripe's $15 fee is actually on the low side of chargebacks (some processors even use the fixed fee + percentage model). Worse, this is unconditional: if you somehow won this, you won't get the chargeback fee.
(Edited to add: that was from Safari. Chrome worked. YMMV.)
Though they could fake it: take the current cleared total and add your amount for your display.
Are these goals monthly goals, with the counter being reset? The sites don’t make that clear.
I submitted a request for commercial use via their online form but never received a response.
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.
What I Mean:
Reference .gov atomic clock (not radium one) -> NTP -> ? -> ? -> satellite control station -> gps -> PTP
Hahaha
Is there any reason to believe that PTP would be better in normal networks?
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
I donated an amount but the bar didn't move and is at the same level($395) as before my donation
mhovd•1h ago
philipwhiuk•1h ago
junon•1h ago
saikia81•1h ago
philipwhiuk•25m ago
Research is put front and centre in their pitch for funding.
willis936•16m ago
iamkonstantin•37m ago
arccy•1h ago
simoncion•1h ago
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?
tdeck•1h ago
https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94...
But..it's $1k. This is basically pocket change on an institutional level. I've been part of some very scrappy and poorly funded community organizations and even they took in more than $1k every year. Even if you don't believe NTP maintainers should be paid anything for their work (an opinion I don't hold), it's trivial to spend this amount on modest everyday expenses like renting a venue a couple of times, buying insurance, and paying for hosting and technical resources.
EDIT: Here is their 2024 tax return
https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf
It looks like they took in more than $200k and spent $100k on "contract services" (I can't tell what that means) and somewhat modest amounts on other things. Unfortunately I need to exit the rabbit hole now.
simoncion•51m ago
How much more clear can they reasonably be?
It seems a big waste of effort to maintain -say- a damnable Trello board with upcoming priorities and roadmaps <strike>and Kickstarter stretch goals</strike> when their bug tracker and mailing list are visible to the public. (Though, it seems that they've put the list behind some broken moderation software, so you have to go to -say- the IETF's archive of the thing to read it. "AI" crawlers ruin everything.)
EDIT: Do note that that tax return you found is for the Network Time Foundation, not the NTP Project. I don't know if the two are separate entities for tax purposes, but do note that the NTF supports several projects, of which the NTP Project is one. The NTP Project is just for NTP.
bawolff•35m ago
I can't imagine its much more than that if we are talking about such a small sum.
arccy•24m ago
and $1000 seems at the same time to be quite a bit of money, but also too little to be for funding people long term.
GuB-42•7m ago
Thankfully, that's also on the front page:
What they are doing:
> The NTP Project produces an open source Reference Implementation of the NTP standard, maintains the implementation Documentation, and develops the protocol and algorithmic standard that is used to communicate time between systems
And why it matters:
> NTP is what ensures the reliability of billions of devices around the world, under the sea, and even in space
Now, it doesn't explain why a reference implementation is a good thing, but I think that at this point, you have a good enough idea to decide if you want to donate or not.
Edit: However, $1000 seems too low to matter. It may not even pay for the expense of the fundraising itself. I think it is more of an awareness campaign: "look at the protocol we all use, you would think we are talking many millions of dollars, but the truth is, you are off by orders of magnitude"
simoncion•1h ago
But yeah, critical infrastructure usually goes criminally underfunded.
littlestymaar•43m ago
xigoi•30m ago
nickelpro•19m ago
Notably NTPd doesn't support leap-smear, which means those who absolutely must have monotonic time can't use it at all.
mananaysiempre•13m ago
... 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.