In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rob Seaman writes: >On Nov 18, 2005, at 5:21 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>As with any consensus-building, the weight is on whoever would like >to see such emerge. For instance, just by debating the issue, the >ITU is asserting that they "own" the UTC standard. Is this actually >the case? I suspect that a squadron of lawyers would likely find >that the International Telecommunications Union is the appropriate >international body to transport time signals relating to, well, >international telecommunications - but what exactly is that? Clearly >other time signal providers exist, e.g., GPS and NTP. But who owns >the underlying concept of Universal Time or the UTC flavor of same? >Perhaps this is the first consensus position to identify. (Along these lines I find it a far more interesting question who "owns" the leap-day formula. Is it still the pope ? :-) I see neither reason nor advantage to move UTC from ITU which is an UN body where all citizens of the planet have a voice to a semi-closed priesthood like IERS or BIPM where only scientists have a voice. In particular not given that these particular scientists seem to be very behind the curve when it comes to modern technologies like data/tele networks etc. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
