J’ai donc voté contre le changement et voici la justification que j’ai donné :
After reading the two excellent papers mentioned as reference, and after discussing the matter with several persons, I tend to think that the fundamental problem is the existence of several user communities, each with different (but perfectly legitimate) requirments. Because these requirments are different, there is zero chance to find a way to satisy them all with one time scale. The only solution is therefore to have several scales and to let each community choose the one which fits its requirments.
Of course, there are already several time scales. I feel that most of the needs of people who want the end of leap seconds would be satisfied by TAI (a very regular time scale, without “steps” and without link with the solar time). If, for one reason ot the other, TAI is not perfect for them, and there is no existing time scale suitable, it may be interesting to develop a new time scale (I’m not convinced it will be necessary: many proposals, such as the one for the “new UTC”, are YATSCOT - “Yet Another Time Scale with a Constant Offset to Tai”). But using the term UTC for a new time scale seems confusing because people and software are now used to the existing definition of UTC.
The root cause of the dispute, I believe, is that too many people would like to have a “primary” time scale, one which is “more equal than others”, hence the fight over UTC (actually, over the name “UTC”). The proper framework of thought would be, not only to have several time scales, but also to recognize them are “equal” and choosen at will by the different communities.
