Doctor MemoryRIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD's "one random dude holding up the entire internet". You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.
Toby@memory No disrespect meant to Dr. Mills here, the single person keeping the protocol going for the last 20 years has been a man named Harlan Stenn.
Dr. David Mills had been blind for a considerable amount of time and was no longer able to re-read old code to be able to explain it to others. Stenn has thanklessly been continuing Mills's vision and receiving far more vitriol: all of the contempt of being the single person keeping a critical piece of software relevant, with none of the respect, adoration, or name recognition of being that code's original developer and proponent.
Alexander The 1st@xenotrope @memory Blind or not, going from a Bus Factor of 2 down to 1 is still pretty significant; especially since now we definitely can't ask Mills for help, and will be relying on Stenn until someone else takes up the mantle of the codebase... ideally multiple people at the same time this time.
:David Campey@AT1ST @memory Not entirely. Mills has been uninvolved in NTP administration for many years. Not only was he not able to contribute code, most of his guidance towards Stenn became less helpful over time as well.
Here's an article that goes into more detail. Not only is one guy not in charge anymore of how NTP is implemented, companies like Google are making significant changes to how they manage time without any protocol standardization process at all.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time
Worse still, folks like Eric S. Raymond have decided to become self-appointed saviors and have swooped in to rewrite NTP as "NTPSec" and added extensions to the original protocol without Stenn's or Mill's knowledge or blessing.