A Google employee (an SRE specifically) asked the systemd upstream not to use their NTP servers by default, as they are quite non-standard and are not meant for use as a sane default in anything.
It was also suggested that systemd registers a vendor pool at pool.ntp.org and use that instead. Apparently, that was already suggested and rejected for the reason of “we are not a product, so we can't”. Ignoring, of course, the fact that pool.ntp.org is perfectly fine with software projects using the default pool.
Notice that he also rejected the idea of disabling timedated at compile time.
“You can disable all the percieved bloat at compile time”, the fanboys say. Everything but a useless logging service and an ntp client you might not need, apparently.
Hilarity insues:
systemd is not a product. Its just some toolset people can build products from. We cannot use the ntp pool hence.
the ntp pool made very clear we cannot use them.
systemd is not an app you install. Its something you have adjust to your needs before you can use it in a product.
shitty servers as default are better than none.
And Lennart blocked — of course — the discussion “[until] the reddit peanut gallery lost interest.”