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Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

ntp.org

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Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#61

Post by zinekeller »

Akronymus wrote: post #45
michaelt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With donations being blocked you keep sitting at 0, with chargebacks you can actually go negative, in a potentially unbounded way.

I really hope that the sole reason that michaelt concluded this is simply due on not having any experience how to manage credit card payments (on merchant's side).

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.

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#62

Post by rnijveld »

theblazehen wrote: post #14
ramon156 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn what off?

pool.ntp.org dns resolution and any servers that they control, presumably

The ntp pool is actually independently run and funded and has nothing to do with the NTPd implementation nor the NTP Foundation, other than them allowing the pool to use that DNS name.

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#63

Post by GuB-42 »

simoncion wrote: post #11
arccy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really clear why they need this money either?

> 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?

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"

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#64

Post by mapt »

bheadmaster wrote: post #4

It's sad that a project that literally every company in the world depends on is requiring donations to keep working.

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.

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#66

Post by jacquesm »

autoexec wrote: post #21
jchw wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#67

Post by ptero »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #52
saikia81 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project isn't about research it's about creating a reference implementation

> 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.

This is probably research into protocol for time sync. Which works well for some scenarios, but not yet for others and can improve the reference implementation (I guess; I have no hard knowledge there).

And given that ntp.org runs servers that so many organizations use they should be near the top of the funding queue for any NTP research. My 2c.

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#69

Post by 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).

Re: Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

#70

Post by zelphirkalt »

jchw wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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