A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 9, 2017 10:46 UTC (Thu) by jnareb (subscriber, #46500)
Parent article: A rift in the NTP world

The split between NTP Classic and NTPsec reminds me of GCC vs EGCS and XFree86 vs X.Org splits... it remains to be seen if NTPsec would be as successful as both of those forks (EGCS becane GCC, X.Org took over XFree86 in Linux).

I wonder why NTP situation is to be different from SSL situation (where we have similarly OpenSSL vs BoringSSL and others).

A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 9, 2017 12:27 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

Since NTPsec decided to remove features that it deems unnecessary, it's technically closer to "OpenSSL vs BoringSSL" than "GCC vs EGCS". As for the interaction between the projects it looks a bit like "LibreOffice vs ApacheOpenOffice". It doesn't make entering either community appealing right now. Wait and see.

A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 9, 2017 12:58 UTC (Thu) by jnareb (subscriber, #46500) [Link]

From what I understand, NTPsec didn't remove features (except for MS Windows support. which supposedly was half-baked at best). It did aggresively (maybe too aggresively) removed no longer supported, thus no longer testable, time sources (refclock) - some of which ceased to work because of underlying service change or removal. Well, it did remove autokey mis-feature, and some duplication.

NTPsec blog describes it quite well.

A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 10, 2017 6:57 UTC (Fri) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (3 responses)

X.Org took over from XFree86 not only on Linux, but everywhere.

See: http://www.xfree86.org/releases/rel480.html

A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 16, 2017 16:36 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Don't forget, that apparently the XFree86 committee were telling people who wanted a GUI on *nix to "go and use Windows".

And the fork to Xorg happened when said committee kicked the primary maintainer (ie the Indian doing the work, not the Chiefs pontificating) out of the project.

And actually, I find the reported comments of NTPsec that "the guys doing NTP are burnt out and should be retired" a perfect example of offensive propaganda. If they're burning out, they need help not flaming. And if Sons was serious, she should at least have *started* by offering to help, not by forking ...

Cheers,
Wol

A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 17, 2017 0:24 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

And if Sons was serious, she should at least have *started* by offering to help, not by forking ...

It seems that's how esr and his friends roll. After all, didn't esr fork many of his other feather-in-the-cap projects, like the Jargon File and fetchmail?

The problem is that offering help requires a certain degree of deference towards the developers who have already been working on the project for a long time, and that doesn't come easy to people who consider themselves the greatest Unix programmers ever (remember that esr basically wrote The Book on the subject, or thinks so, anyway). If you're all “I'm new to this project but you're doing everything completely wrong – wrong language, wrong build system, and your code is insecure, too, let me sort this out for you already”, then forking is basically your only option because nobody likes a know-it-all bully.

A rift in the NTP world

Posted Feb 17, 2017 15:08 UTC (Fri) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

Here's another edifying Eric Raymond story, wherein he covers himself in his usual glory.

http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html