Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k
74 comments
·November 12, 2025mhovd
I am surprised that NTP project is not funded, fully or partially, by larger organizations or governments, given the criticality of the project.
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.
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.
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.
bobmcnamara
Pitch: TAI
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.
littlestymaar
Large tech companies and free-riding critical internet commons, name a better duo.
null
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
philipwhiuk
> The NTP Project conducts Research and Development in NTP, a protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network to a common timebase.
Research is put front and centre in their pitch for funding.
willis936
What's the distinction from NIST's internet time service?
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?
tdeck
It is kind of vague IMO. Especially since most of the actual NTP infrastructure is run by governments, universities, and companies.
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.
GuB-42
It doesn't explain why they need the money "we need the money to continue doing what we are doing" means nothing unless they also explain what they are doing and why it matters.
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"
arccy
a website doesn't need $1000
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.
stego-tech
Absolutely shameful that this project - and many, many others that underpin trillion-dollar tech company valuations - aren’t fully funded already by the major consumers.
I’d like to see more projects do a breakdown of total yearly costs (including contributor compensation!), how much existing sponsorships from companies actually cover, and what number they’d need to operate properly (with full-time, paid contributors).
jchw
I tried to donate, but apparently I am not human:
> 1 error prohibited this submission from being saved:
> Looks like you are not a human
Good to know.
autoexec
I'm not sure why they'd try so hard to keep bots from paying them anyway. If someone wants to write a bot that constantly pays me good money I'm fine with that. I might rate limit it if the stream of payments coming in can't cover the cost of keeping the server from being DoS'd, but that's not going to inconvenience a human trying to submit a payment one time.
slv77
Bots use sites like this to validate lists of stolen cards with low dollar donations to validate the cards before using them on the target site. Without some one of protection sites like these are quickly flooded with fraudulent transactions and then fined and shut down by Visa and Mastercard.
lapsis_beeftech
This sounds like a problem where cryptocurrency could actually be the solution. Next time I want to make a charitable donation I will ask for an XMR address to preserve my privacy and work around commercial payment processor issues.
JimDabell
If you have small payments that can be made by bots easily, then your service can be used by thieves as an oracle to determine which of their stolen credit card numbers still work. Then you get lots of chargebacks to deal with.
op7
Then when too many of the fradulent payments get charged back then your payment processor drops you
michaelt
Sure, chargebacks cost money.
You know what else costs money? When someone wants to give you money, and you misidentify them as a bot and refuse their money.
jacquesm
That's because the bots will use such services to 'taste' cards to see if they work. Then if they do the criminals can resell them for a higher value than for which they bought them for.
bmacho
[deleted]
dietr1ch
Well fraudsters need to have their time in sync for their business right? Who are you to deny their donations?
mjhay
Is there a problem with fraudsters donating to OSS projects?
johnisgood
Money is money.
How do you know the cash you are using is not "blood money"? Come on.
landgenoot
You are thinking to much in emoji's and emdashes.
zelphirkalt
I had similar trouble, back when I tried to donate to the Internet archive. Donation box would simply not let me donate. I even wrote them an e-mail and nothing changed half a year later, so I gave up.
Too bad that good projects mess their donations up by doing web BS.
fghorow
Yeah, I'm not a human either.
(Edited to add: that was from Safari. Chrome worked. YMMV.)
sathackr
That seems very low for such a high profile site/project
I donated an amount but the bar didn't move and is at the same level($395) as before my donation
Velocifyer
The bar is still at $395. I am suspicious.
sathackr
If you follow the "Foundations work" link at the bottom, you're taken to another page that shows $4,675 of $11,000 November goal.
sathackr
Looks like the first $1000 goal is specifically for maintaining to he NTP website and maybe developers? While the other is a broader goal for the foundation
tomashubelbauer
I wish when accepting donations, websites would stop caching the total collected amount or give it a super short TTL. I like to see the little progress bar get closer to the goal thanks to my couple of bucks.
dspillett
If they are only counting fully cleared funds, your payment might not be relevant yet. Some fraud checks are not synchronous, for instance.
Though they could fake it: take the current cleared total and add your amount for your display.
pigbearpig
Perhaps they don't have the funds to implement that feature.
clbrmbr
The folks who run the public NTP pool really ought not to make it easier to pay them money to use it commercially.
I submitted a request for commercial use via their online form but never received a response.
jacquesm
They should just switch it off for a day or two, I don't think they'll have trouble getting funding after that.
gnarlouse
I’m confused—why such a small donation amount?
Velocifyer
Most NTP users use better implementations that NTPd (like chrony)
47282847
Confusing. On https://www.nwtime.org/ they use $11,000 as “November 2025 goal“, with $4,675 as current level?
Are these goals monthly goals, with the counter being reset? The sites don’t make that clear.
null
bheadmaster
It's sad that a project that literally every company in the world depends on is requiring donations to keep working.
null
mapt
I feel like a ~$10M/yr foundation to fund hundreds of the "Some Guy In Nebraska" people (https://xkcd.com/2347/) on a modest stipend would be easily worthwhile for any one of the tech giants, even understanding the free rider effect. Some of their thousands of engineers are being paid high six or seven figures, and every single minute of their time spent figuring out how some dependency has changed and broken compatibility adds up very quickly. Just paying them to sit on their hands and not let anything break by some kind of hostile takeover, like an intelligence agency quietly paying people to keep quiet.
The project has been hungry for years.
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