It's simpler than that. Knowingly hardcoding someone else's timeservers without even speaking with the operator of said timeservers is Internet hostility, parti

It's simpler than that. Knowingly hardcoding someone else's timeservers without even speaking with the operator of said timeservers is Internet hostility, particularly when your project is popular enough to be deployed on potentially millions of machines. D-Link hardcoded PHK's timeserver many years ago: https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/ https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/ Netgear hardcoded the University of Wisconsin even earlier than that: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/ The best part about the Netgear one was it hit upwards of a quarter million packets per second and actively resisted mitigation by admins. Seriously, don't hardcode. Ever.