News has broken out today that Dave Mills, inventor of the Network Time Protocol and author of the reference implementation has passed on.

The protocol and its implementation, now referred to as NTP classic, is near ubiquitous on the Internet keeping all sorts of connected servers in sync.

However, this has for a long time (decades) been happening with very little funding, with Dave Mills and his successors doing it as mostly a labour of love.

This is not unique to NTP, but a number of critical Internet infrastructure likewise just chugs along through the efforts of underfunded volunteers, yet a multiple of commercial corporations are making a lot of money building on top of these foundational layers.

With little in terms of resources, NTP classic was plagued by with security bugs. A project emerged to upgrade the classic implementation and harden it called NTPsec, which is now mostly considered its official successor, although this is not without some controversy.

Debian, which is what I prefer for Linux servers has now replaced NTP classic with NTPsec, and hopefully going forward, NTPsec and similar foundational Internet infrastructure will receive a lot more in terms of resources for long term sustainability.