There is an architectural point to be made here that is relevant to the Internet.
Long ago, someone got upset that email wasn't displaying correctly on his terminal. So he hacked some code into the mail server to wrap lines at 80 columns. The underlying assumption the user made being that his problem was a universal one and his solution should be imposed on everyone.
Of course, there is also an end-to-end argument that could be made but that just ends up being a different way to say the same thing. Putting the 'intelligence' in the mail server is bad because it forces a long series of assumptions onto the use of the system.
It seems to me that the notion of making global changes to the presentation of time raises the same problem. The set of assumptions daylight savings rest on is quite extensive:
* That everyone works in the same time zone as they live in.
* That everyone has a job tied to office hours.
etc. etc.
Summer time was originally invented by a man who wanted to play a round of golf before going to work. He didn't invent the notion of people getting up earlier in the day during the summer, that was in the factory acts a century earlier. The opening times for factories were 6am to 6pm in summer, 7am to 7pm in winter. Instead of making global changes to the clocks, the adjustment was made to the schedule.
The nonsense of leap seconds has a similar effect. Anyone remotely familiar with astronomy knows that the time of noon varies by a quarter hour over the course of a year at European latitudes. So making adjustments of a few seconds per decade makes no real difference over a human lifespan. And no, nautical navigation does not rely on time being adjusted either, you have to use a correction chart and take account of your latitude etc. or you will be off by a very large rock.
What is really going on here is some people get a smug feeling of importance from 'being in charge of time' and they really don't want to give it up. It isn't just servers that get messed up. Scientific data sets get messed up because corrections are not applied when they should be or they are applied more than once.
What we need is a version of military time, call it Internet time being essentially TAI with a fixed offset of 37 seconds. No further leap seconds, presented according to the Gregorian calendar.
