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It isn't ambiguous at all. If you're publishing something, whether it's open and free or commercial you're a vendor so you have to follow the policy ntp.org set-up for such entities.

That person on github is misunderstanding both Poettering and the ntp.org's policy.

MatejLach's elaborated on Poettering's point of view for that matter. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issuecomment-1...

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The way I see it is:

* NTP Pool welcomes open source projects to use their servers

* They want vendors to register a vendor prefix

so there are two options, either systemd is a vendor, and can register and use systemd.pool.ntp.org, or it isn't, and can use pool.ntp.org

They can use "the pool", i.e. the collection of NTP servers.

They could (register a "vendor zone") and use "[0-3].systemd.pool.ntp.org". They can, technically, even use "[0-3].pool.ntp.org", but the NTP Pool Project is saying they cannot use [the specific hostname] "pool.ntp.org".

That last part is what people are apparently not understanding.

Also, OpenBSD blatantly ignores it and uses "pool.ntp.org" anyways.

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