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weinzierl 5 hours ago [-]
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.
He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk.
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).
Since May this year we have the young and energetic Dominik Krause and there is hope for change again.
By "balk" did you instead mean "budge"? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
zachwlewis 1 hours ago [-]
balk is the American spelling of baulk, meaning to hesitate, stop short, or refuse to proceed due to reluctance, fear, or an obstacle.
"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]."
jjp 1 hours ago [-]
Baulk - refuse to comply
OtomotO 2 hours ago [-]
LiMux was such a hopeful project.
Let's see whether times truly have changed with the reckless US administration and the total dependence on closed source US software.
Maybe Europe will finally truly wake up.
4 hours ago [-]
hchja 51 minutes ago [-]
Why would you want/need change when it comes to OS of choice in the public administration?
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?
QuantumNomad_ 44 minutes ago [-]
From the linked Wikipedia article about LiMux:
> 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.
and:
> 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).
> 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.
> This sabbatical is not only open to employees of the City of Munich, but also to external software developers.
So cool. Congrats to Sebastian!
ayanb 2 hours ago [-]
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)
vasco 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
what-is-water 2 minutes ago [-]
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).
> 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!
It's for problems like these that I have been working at cross and native Windows support in the Nix ecosystem
kristianp 5 hours ago [-]
Related discussion of the maintainer stepping down from libxml2 support. libexpat is a different library of course.
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
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
What’s happens after 6 months?
gregjw 2 hours ago [-]
nothing. its a 10 year old project. i guess they'll stop receiving funding from Munich? thats about it.
bboreham 23 minutes ago [-]
It’s a 28 year old project.
Axtrivc 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
5 hours ago [-]
google234123 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
neuronexmachina 3 hours ago [-]
Cities shouldn't fund the software they rely on?
google234123 3 hours ago [-]
Cities need a lot of things - should they fund everything?
mindwok 3 hours ago [-]
Whether they should or shouldn't is a worthy question that they have no influence over. Taking the initiative and supporting the software they rely on is a good step in the meantime while we argue on HN about whether it's optimal or not.
olyjohn 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody whines when they overpay millions to Microsoft for trash software. Fund one tiny project and everybody loses their mind.
quakeguy 12 minutes ago [-]
Yes.
tyromaniac 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, because if they need them, they won't function without them
jcelerier 2 hours ago [-]
yes
HDBaseT 2 hours ago [-]
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?
johnny22 2 hours ago [-]
they are gonna pay for software either way.
righthand 5 hours ago [-]
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.
neuronexmachina 3 hours ago [-]
Chrome uses libexpat for XML parsing, not XSLT.
righthand 3 hours ago [-]
I believe Chrome uses libxml2 (though perhaps they use libexpat too) and the WHATWG has claimed that XSLT should not exist as a part of the HTML spec (it should and does), so the WHATWG Google members can force Javascript rendering on everyone and secure their advertising monopoly (which is loaded through js). Their claim is that libxml2 is too security riddled and they can’t contribute any work to it even though they have plenty of people and money to help fix it and they just wrote a post claiming that LLMs has helped reduce the amount of bugs in Chrome. The jerks even used LLMs to generate an untested polyfill in Javascript so that they can reduce the absolutely stellar performance of XML rendering to slow Javascript. They also used the untested pollyfill as a reason to remove it.
These are people who supposedly like the diverse web and performant technologies.
He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk.
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).
Since May this year we have the young and energetic Dominik Krause and there is hope for change again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
[2] https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
"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]."
Let's see whether times truly have changed with the reckless US administration and the total dependence on closed source US software.
Maybe Europe will finally truly wake up.
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?
> 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.
and:
> 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).
> 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.
> This sabbatical is not only open to employees of the City of Munich, but also to external software developers.
So cool. Congrats to Sebastian!
1: https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#ope...
It's for problems like these that I have been working at cross and native Windows support in the Nix ecosystem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196
10 months ago | 119 comments
Also related:
https://xkcd.com/2347/
These are people who supposedly like the diverse web and performant technologies.