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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the ntpsec story, not great. I don't believe they're taken especially seriously. There are people close to Harlan Stenn who believe the project is essentially fraudulent.

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An ntpd-rs contributor elsewhere in the thread suggests ntpsec is used by many distributions, and suggests donating to ntpsec (amongst some other organisations).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45900184

Every distribution I've seen is using chrony or systemd-timesyncd. Is there a distribution that's actually using ntpsec?

> the project is essentially fraudulent

Even if it's not, ESR is involved so it's not serious.

So, I understand first hand ESR might be a little, uh, eccentric, when dealing with humans.

But it seems that his nerding, taken by itself, is pretty solid. Is that not the case?

No, I don't think it is.

It’s fairly limited: taking over maintenance for popmail or forking NTPSec certainly isn’t nothing but his reputation is built on the Cathedral and Bazaar essay getting attention at the right time in the 90s when open source was really taking off and his subsequent OSI work. I’d wager that an order of magnitude more people heard about fetchmail from his writing rather than the other way around.

That’s not to say that his open source projects aren’t useful, only that there are thousands of other developers who’ve done work of similar scale and adoption.

> Is that not the case?

Not really, see forex the reposurgeon nonsense. https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Git-Not-Yet-Settled

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