I don't understand why this is necessary. We already have TAI (international atomic time) which is just UTC without leap seconds. It sounds like this committee voted to stop adding leap seconds to UTC, but not to "reset" the leap seconds that have already been added, effectively cementing a constant difference between UTC and TAI. What is the point?
Anybody who cares about leap seconds should have just been using TAI all along instead of UTC anyway.
It's effectively a way to migrate to TAI. We're going to end up with UTC and TAI having a consistent offset and with no expectation of UTC trying to account for the earths rotation.
That's a good start. It makes the UTC and TAI conversion trivial and consistent. Much easier to migrate at that point.
The committee still wants UTC to be periodically adjusted to match the Earth's rotation. They just want to adjust it less often, where "less often" probably rounds to "never" in practical terms.
Huh, so they want to go from small, frequent anomalies to large, infrequent anomalies. I think "never" is going to be exactly accurate; once we reach 1 minute of offset from astronomical time, everyone will be too afraid to adjust UTC because we'll have had a couple centuries of complacent software written in the meantime. Got it!
A leap minute once per ~century probably amortizes to a lot less effort. A leap minute is a bigger deal to implement, but you do it a lot less often. And the sun being off by up to a minute isn't a huge deal for humans
Anybody who cares about leap seconds should have just been using TAI all along instead of UTC anyway.