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.
I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind.
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).
> 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.
It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and other large US vendors when many other European countries like France are investiging heavily into building up European alternatives.
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]."
Merriam-Webster has balk as to stop short and refuse to proceed. To understand the intended meaning, put the emphasis on the first part: If the mayor did not balk, he did not stop, that is, he refused to comply and proceeded with his plan.
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?
> 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).
Having your public administration be dependent on the whims of a foreign government (and yes, Microsoft is subject to whims of the US government if it comes down to it) is just a bad idea in general. And in particular since 2 years ago.
Then there's the ridiculous license costs that could be saved.
> 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.
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).
> 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
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
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.
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?
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.
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/
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).
It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and other large US vendors when many other European countries like France are investiging heavily into building up European alternatives.
"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]."
What he did not do was comply/capitulate/etc.
So he did not refuse to comply, i.e. complied? I think the parent is right: Grandparent probably meant "he did not budge".
1: to refuse abruptly
2: to stop short and refuse to proceed
Per Cambridge Dictionary, it means:
to be unwilling to do something or to allow something to happen
So "He did not balk" can be read as "He did not stop" / "He was willing to let things proceed"
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).
Then there's the ridiculous license costs that could be saved.
> 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.