So, from the spec file, it looks like our 'rdate' implementation was written years ago by someone who no longer works for Red Hat, Elliot Lee.

The given URL for the app and for the source tarball no longer works - ftp://people.redhat.com/sopwith/ does not exist. As there is no functional upstream, we are carrying multiple patches in the Fedora package, even though 'we' (RH) wrote the damn thing in the first place!

This seems kinda silly. 'thrice' on IRC points out that there is an implementation called openrdate:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openrdate/

which is a standalone packaging of the OpenBSD implementation. It's an active upstream that is currently maintained, and various other distros use it. If we really still need an rdate implementation, perhaps we should use that one?