[time-nuts] GMT vs. UTC

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Nov 21 17:53:10 UTC 2006


In message <20061121.184838.-432831398.cfmd at bredband.net>, Magnus Danielson wri
tes:

>One has to understand the reason for my question, which stems back into the
>legalities of things. Can we state a time event in GMT and relate that back to
>our "non-political timescales" of TAI and UTC (UTC has politics around it for
>sure, but those are on the leapsecond aspect) which we methods for transporting
>and realizing, and then say with certainty that this time is _known_ in a legal
>sense. Especially, can we do this in some other country than GB?

Well, if Sweden defines their time to be GMT+1h and the british parliament
changes GMT, then in a theoretical world, Sweden changes along.

In a practical world, people write GMT when they mean UTC half the time
and therefore Sweden would not follow GB.

Since UTC is a UN controlled standard, it is a much safer reference.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




More information about the Time-nuts_lists.febo.com mailing list