title: What is the common practice with regards to differentiating between UTC and GMT?
body: <p>I finally found out the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time" rel="noreferrer">difference between UTC and GMT</a> by making the effort to look it up on Wikipedia today. Technically speaking it appears that GMT != UTC because you do not know if it is UTC or UT1 being referred to. However practically, people use the terms interchangeably to indicate the same timezone.</p>
  
  <p>A while ago, I suggested that we change the user interface of one of my companies apps to display UTC instead of GMT.</p>
  
  <p>Just to be sure that our database was not calculating the potential seconds difference between GMT and UTC, I ran the below query and verified that they both are just acting as aliases for the same timezone.</p>
  
  <pre><code>select now() AT TIME ZONE 'GMT', now() AT TIME ZONE 'UTC';
            timezone          |          timezone          
  ----------------------------+----------------------------
   2009-02-11 08:46:11.643032 | 2009-02-11 08:46:11.643032
  (1 row)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What do you think? Do enough users out there understand UTC? Is it better to use the older but more common term? Or should I just do a UTC/GMT?</p>