[LEAPSECS] is leap smear legal in Germany?

[Kevin Birth]

Since law significantly lags behind technology, the leap smear is probably not illegal in any private network in any country.  After all, UTC is still not the "legal" time in many countries.

NTP was developed after rubber seconds.  If NTP had developed before rubber seconds, and if the increments lengthening the rubber seconds were small enough, there might never have been a leap second policy.  

Cheers,

Kevin


________________________________________
From: LEAPSECS <leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com> on behalf of Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de>
Sent: Monday, February 4, 2019 10:48 AM
To: leapsecs at leapsecond.com
Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] is leap smear legal in Germany?

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Steve,

Steve Allen wrote:
> The story about the German time broadcasts of DCF77 is in Bulletin
> Horaire.
[...]
> But now I am trolling and asking:
> Given that rubber seconds are illegal in Germany, is it legal to
> use Google/Amazon NTP servers that provide smeared leap seconds?

Thanks for the historic facts on DCF77, that's very interesting.

I don't know if it's legal or not, but I know some of our customers here
in Germany have explicitly configured their Meinberg LANTIME NTP servers
to do leap second smearing.

It's not because they like smearing seconds so much, it's just because
it's a reliable way to avoid problems caused by OS kernels which simply
step the system time back to insert a leap second.

Martin
--
Martin Burnicki

Senior Software Engineer

MEINBERG Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG
Email: martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Phone: +49 5281 9309-414
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinburnicki/

Lange Wand 9, 31812 Bad Pyrmont, Germany
Amtsgericht Hannover 17HRA 100322
Geschäftsführer/Managing Directors: Günter Meinberg, Werner Meinberg,
Andre Hartmann, Heiko Gerstung
Websites: https://www.meinberg.de  https://www.meinbergglobal.com
Training: https://www.meinberg.academy

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