The internet's authoritative source for time-zone data has been shut down after the volunteer programmer who maintained it was sued for copyright infringement by a maker of astrology software.

David Olson, custodian of the Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Database, said on Thursday he was retiring the FTP server he's long maintained. Also known as the Olson database, it's the official reference Unix machines use to set clocks to local time and is used by countless websites and applications to reconcile time differences across the world

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Indeed, Olson's database includes comments that credit The American Atlas from ACS Publications as the source for some of the historical data it contains. The FTP database is the principal source for time-zone data, mapping the the zones of a given geography on a given date. The Unix operating system, Java-based applications, and untold numbers of websites rely on it to determine what time it is or was in a certain location. The service was free.

“The impact of this is severe for anyone that uses it – whether via Java, Unix or some other means,” Java developer Stephen Colebourne blogged on Thursday. “We all owe a debt of gratitude to the database maintainers who have worked on this for many, many years at zero cost to the industry and for zero financial gain

“I hereby call on the industry leaders to help sort this out,” Colebourne wrote. “IBM, Oracle, Apple, Google, RedHat I'm looking at you.”