The longer background is that Christian Ude our mayor until 2014 furthered the LiMux[1] project - migrating more than 14000 PCs in public administration to Linux.<p>He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk.<p>Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft's siren song abolished LiMux and Microsoft got a nice campus in the city (they used to be at the outskirts).<p>Since May this year we have the young and energetic Dominik Krause and there is hope for change again.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/</a>
I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind.<p>Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).
By "balk" did you instead mean "budge"? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
balk is the American spelling of baulk, meaning to hesitate, stop short, or refuse to proceed due to reluctance, fear, or an obstacle.<p>"He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft but did not balk" can be rephrased as "He was pressured by Microsoft [to stay with Windows] but that pressure did not cause him to hesitate [with switching to Linux]."
Baulk - refuse to comply
LiMux was such a hopeful project.<p>Let's see whether times truly have changed with the reckless US administration and the total dependence on closed source US software.<p>Maybe Europe will finally truly wake up.
Why would you want/need change when it comes to OS of choice in the public administration?<p>If you personally prefer Linux then you should install that. Maybe I’m not understanding the impact of one over the other in this scenario or if it’s a long historical gripe thats shared between many Munich citizens?
From the linked Wikipedia article about LiMux:<p>> The main goal was to achieve more independence from software distributors. The decision in 2003 had two components: to get free software running on most desktops, and to buy and develop web-based and platform independent (e.g. Java-based) business applications. A core goal was to reduce reliance of Microsoft-based software stacks and fund local developers to write replacement software.<p>and:<p>> The city reported that due to the project, it had gained freedom in software decisions, increased security and saved €11.7 million (US$16 million).
<a href="https://opensource.muenchen.de/sabbatical.html" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.muenchen.de/sabbatical.html</a><p>> The Open Source Sabbatical is intended to provide professionally qualified software developers with the opportunity to work on an open source project for a limited period of time in order to improve it.<p>> This sabbatical is not only open to employees of the City of Munich, but also to external software developers.<p>So cool. Congrats to Sebastian!
Thanks for highlighting. I just realized this is open to developers who aren't city employees, which is unique. A city can pay a vendor for a deliverable, but paying an outside individual to improve something the city doesn't own is interesting (to say the least)
Smells of favoritism and corruption and lack of priorities is what it does. This guy must know someone. I doubt that of everything the city of Munich depends on, an xml parser even registers as a thing that needs money. And if it did then you'd have to have given similar to so much more things already.
The 6 month open source sabbatical is something any external developers can apply to (with a specific Open Source project and an Idea what to do), and the city selects among the candidates. They do explain why they picked libexpat[1] (google translate works well enough for the site).<p>1: <a href="https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#open-source-sabbatical" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#ope...</a>
> PS: If anyone managed to combine Clang-based MinGW with AddressSanitizer and Wine without crashing at launch, please show me how and drop me an e-mail. Thank you!<p>It's for problems like these that I have been working at cross and native Windows support in the Nix ecosystem
Related discussion of the maintainer stepping down from libxml2 support. libexpat is a different library of course.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196</a><p>10 months ago | 119 comments<p>Also related:<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2347/</a>
What’s happens after 6 months?
this is great! xmlppm was big part of xml study which did years ago and which uses expat for parsing xml; was first fond memory of expat / keep up great work
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Cities shouldn't fund the software they rely on?
Would you consider a city buying a Microsoft Office E3 license (Copilot 365 or whatever the fuck its called) for their staff an efficient use of taxes?
they are gonna pay for software either way.
Hey maybe the haters at Google /WHATWG can use this library instead of killing off XSLT. Just kidding we all know they’re too compromised by monopoly/advertising interests of Google and their own beliefs to allow such a cool technology to live on; and don’t have the skills for such a thing.