I imagine that it is not only Mill's blindness that could be depressing, but also his comments about aging and relevancy: that in his 20s he was "one of [the hackers actively working on stuff]", then in his 40s he was "their father" and in his 60s he's an "old geezer who can be ignored".

I think the story of NTP, a protocol largely maintained by the same people who were around when it was new and exciting and needed to be invented, but who are increasingly becoming older and less able to continue their work, can be told about a number of protocols.

It was interesting that the article mentions Bitcoin, and Goldberg's comment about how she wishes that NPT "were more like Bitcoin". Bitcoin (whatever you think of its economics or externalities) is a very very fortunate protocol. Both in that it is able to fund its own development and also that the people who built it are still mostly young and healthy.

I think it's a very sad thing that something like NTP, which is much more foundational and critical than Bitcoin, has no self-funding model and there is not even a clear way for it to have one. I know esr had some sort of Patreon-like thing he started but I don't think it went anywhere, and Linux has managed to find a model in which many kernel developers are actually paid by large corporations to work on it, but most protocols continue to be maintained as a personal sacrifice by individual people who are finite and precious.

Posted Oct 6, 2022 5:55 UTC (Thu) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665) [Link]

You quote Goldberg as saying that she wishes that NPT "were more like Bitcoin". She is not quoted as saying that, at least not in the NY article; my feeling is that you should not have used quotation marks when paraphrasing her.

For reference, what she is actually quoted as saying is that she thinks time synchronization should have a cryptocurrency-like buzz around it (ideally with less controversy)—coders who contribute to it, she said, should feel proud enough to declare, “Everyone uses the software, it’s in everything, and I wrote it!”.

But I completely agree with your last paragraph. We've seen this time and time again (eg, with GPG); someone creates something so useful that it becomes ubiquitous, then universally-relied-on, and we come to forget that the whole edifice is held up by a tiny group of unpaid (or at least underpaid) volunteers.

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time (New Yorker)