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.
"Microsoft got a nice campus in the city" - plus they decided to pay taxes (Gewerbesteuer) in Munich rather than Unterschleißheim, despite Munich having a higher rate.
The biggest problem is that none of these projects actually go for the full stack, hardware, operating systems, programming languages, user software, cloud infra.
It is mostly a specific kind, and lasts one ruling period in most cases.
On my German city, the library used a SuSE based distro for the computers, eventually it got back into Windows, when they switched IT support company.
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.
> 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.
I feel like one of us is extremely confused.
"Balk" = "stop" = "refuse to proceed", right?
So "<did not> balk" = "<did not> stop" = "<did not> refuse to proceed", right?
"<Did not> refuse to proceed" with Microsoft's proposal therefore means he in fact complied with Microsoft's proposal and did proceed with it, right?
No. Balk = stop and return on your steps. He was moving towards ”migrating more than 14000 PCs in public administration to Linux”, Gates and Ballmer tried to make him stop, but he continued on his path.
In this case, willing to proceed with what he was planning to do, that is, moving from Windows to Linux against Microsoft's wishes.
edit: And you're right that this implies "balking at Microsoft's proposal". Personally, I did read the sentence as intended ("they wanted him to balk (= stop his plans), but he did not"), but I can see how the phrasing can be misleading...
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.
Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no?
Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints.
The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is.
And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat.
As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.
Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010.
What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
> It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
Resources are not infinite. European deficits are ballooning, and europe's ability to invest in anything (go further into debt) is constrained by peoples willingness to lend money to European governments at reasonable rates (the bond market)....a willingness which is rapidly collapsing for France, Germany, UK, etc due to lack of growth and underwater social entitlements.
As of right now, there's about 1000X more people working on Microsoft Office than on Frontier AI in Europe. Hence why Europe isn't even near being able to compete with the US and China on the frontier.
Cool that we're re-creating 1990s Microsoft Software in 2026 (why not an EU-native fax machine too? those are still used heavily in 80% of German orgs).
But what will you do if OpenAI/Anthropic/Kimi/GLM cut off your access? The frontier is only going to continue advancing and the openness of the Chinese models will not last forever.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon?
> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees
I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much.
People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees.
I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places.
> Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.
This shows a profound ignorance for how much of modern life, especially within a bureaucracy, is powered by banal software like office suites.
If you can cripple the everyday workings of government, even temporarily, by shutting off access to Microsoft word, then that is a serious security concern. End of story.
I get it, for a forum of people who build software for a living, it's upsetting to confront the idea that the stuff you make doesn't actually matter that much, especially in a post-AI world. Hell, even pre-AI you can just install LibreOffice and it will functionally be the same.
But honestly, if we're comparing ENERGY and FERTILIZER to productivity software, it's no contest as to which is more important for the functioning of modern life.
You cannot vibe code your way out of an energy shortage or switch to 'open-source' fertilizer as soon as tomorrow.
Given how fragile unreliable those processes are, you probably can without doing much damage. Its not like replacing good quality software with something vibe coded.
> You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine.
Have you missed the news where multiple countries tried to do exactly that and it took either multiple tries or was abandoned? This is very deeply engrained in government and corporate networks (For good reasons like support, backwards compatibility, staffing etc.) but it's not something you can change over night like replacing your parents computer with a Linux version with a similar GUI and hoping all will be fine.
It's very difficult to do it smoothly with no downtime, but all it takes is one emergency for the existing workflows to be thrown out. Companies suffer emergencies and data losses all the time and nothing ever actually happens, they get over it.
> Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success
I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.
Corruption unfortunately also happens in Bavaria as this can be seen.
Thankfully Merz is not affiliated with big business at all ... oh wait, nevermind. (One reason why public opinion about him has totally downed. That, as well as his age - old people are often really a bad choice for politics, we can all see this in the USA right now.)
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$16 million).
Having your public administration be dependent on the whims of a foreign government (and yes, Microsoft is subject to whims of the US government if it comes down to it) is just a bad idea in general. And in particular since 2 years ago.
Then there's the ridiculous license costs that could be saved.
> The Open Source Sabbatical is intended to provide professionally qualified software developers with the opportunity to work on an open source project for a limited period of time in order to improve it.
> This sabbatical is not only open to employees of the City of Munich, but also to external software developers.
Thanks for highlighting. I just realized this is open to developers who aren't city employees, which is unique. A city can pay a vendor for a deliverable, but paying an outside individual to improve something the city doesn't own is interesting (to say the least)
Smells of favoritism and corruption and lack of priorities is what it does. This guy must know someone. I doubt that of everything the city of Munich depends on, an xml parser even registers as a thing that needs money. And if it did then you'd have to have given similar to so much more things already.
The 6 month open source sabbatical is something any external developers can apply to (with a specific Open Source project and an Idea what to do), and the city selects among the candidates. They do explain why they picked libexpat[1] (google translate works well enough for the site).
Agreed, they should hire an army of consultants to select a proprietary software replacement that the city will pay for but not own, having to pay ongoing license fees for ongoing use. Much more efficient ant fair that way.
LibreOffice uses libexpat (https://libexpat.github.io/doc/users/), and one of the major issues with using OSS in public administration is that there is still no open source office suite that can compete with M$ Office...
> The City of Munich follows the principle of Public Money, Public Code:
Whenever possible, software developed in-house should be released as open source.
The goal is not only to ensure the city’s own IT security but also to enable others to reuse the software securely, transparently, and in a traceable way.[1]
> 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
Nixpkgs cross support for Windows has been in there a while. Native windows support for Nix is a bit less advertised because it is pre-release/pre-MVP-on-master, but see https://github.com/nix-windows/nix-windows-demo . And expect to hear more on this in the next few weeks :).
One thing XML is very good for is semantic documents adhering to a well defined schema - and it's one of the few commonly used text-based data storage formats that do it well (with XSD, DTDs are pretty terrible). Unfortunately the only library that currently implements validation is libxml2 - expat is way nicer, but it never supported it. I don't understand why most XML libraries do not implement validation - XML sucks as a plain data storage format anyway.
I had a good experience with DITA based tools when writing technical documentation a few years ago, and there are enough graphical tools for a Word like experience.
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.
I'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.
No I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I don’t need to “find a better argument here” because the pathetic WHATWG cowards never did. They were divisive about it just to be divisive and impose their brain dead opinion on the world. So I am returning that logical approach to their “improvement” of the web.
Interesting. What sorts of projects did you use XSLT for? I used it once to transform some XSD schema documents into HTML for presentation, but it would've been pretty trivial to do the same in JS in browser, or Python for offline transformation. It didn't seem like that amazing of a technology in my experience. Curious to hear what you liked so much about it.
I enjoy it because of it’s simplicity and ability to essentially ship a compiled template built from “components” (XSLT templates) that rendered much more quickly without having to wait for JS to load and render. That you could ship someone a tar of Xml documents and have them rendered entirely client side. If you spend time with XSLT you will see it was essentially React JSX before React in a lot of ways without all the cruft. Then if you still needed JS functionality you could layer that on top. But the main benefit being that you did not have to EVER worry about implementing “trivial” rendering for templates at all and the templates could be mapped to much more simpler data documents (XML). For all the good advice about separating data from design online and using compiled templates, XSLT gets a bad rap because XML has a bunch of other features unrelated to it that people use that can be complex. But then why does XSLT have to be deprecated if the problems are actually with XML?
And for the record if they’re removing it for “security” reasons I think that means that the performant XSLT rendering is not trivial at all. I would love to see the trivial code for rendering those documents in JS because I don’t believe it. If it’s so trivial then it should be a no brainer to ship such a thing with every browser. Or if “security” issues are that big of deal why not create a new XSLT standard for HTML that removes the XML issues?
There are many sites that still use it but since it’s a way to eschew JS by using modern CSS + XSLT, obviously Google wants it gone.
I really don’t understand how React JSX gets praise praise praise (regardless evangelization) but the similar technology that was even better and earlier than it is somehow not impressive.
I used it for all my personal projects, single page sites, multi-page sites, sites that required multiple template types, and for shipping a tar of documents. The beauty being that I didn’t need a CMS or framework to essentially create documents that can be composed of reuseable components/blocks.
I was working on a project that used Redbean and XSLT+XML documents to create shippable binaries that were instantly viewable in the browser, but I have halted that project as Google has won by creating the stigma Kool-aid around it. This will be my RSS hill to die on.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
[2] https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
"Microsoft got a nice campus in the city" - plus they decided to pay taxes (Gewerbesteuer) in Munich rather than Unterschleißheim, despite Munich having a higher rate.
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.
The biggest problem is that none of these projects actually go for the full stack, hardware, operating systems, programming languages, user software, cloud infra.
It is mostly a specific kind, and lasts one ruling period in most cases.
On my German city, the library used a SuSE based distro for the computers, eventually it got back into Windows, when they switched IT support company.
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.
"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]."
If he did not balk that means he did not refuse. Which means he complied.
What he did not do was comply/capitulate/etc.
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.
> 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.
I feel like one of us is extremely confused.
"Balk" = "stop" = "refuse to proceed", right?
So "<did not> balk" = "<did not> stop" = "<did not> refuse to proceed", right?
"<Did not> refuse to proceed" with Microsoft's proposal therefore means he in fact complied with Microsoft's proposal and did proceed with it, right?
The thing he "<Did not> refuse to proceed" with was LiMux, his project for moving away from Microsoft.
Baulk - refuse to comply
> He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk.
So he did not refuse to comply, i.e. complied? I think the parent is right: Grandparent probably meant "he did not budge".
Per Merriam-Webster, 'to balk' means:
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"
> Per Cambridge Dictionary, it means: to be unwilling to do something
You agree balking means being unwilling, right?
So not balking means being willing, right?
He did not balk, therefore he was not unwilling, therefore he was willing, right?
So he was willing to do what Microsoft asked, "but" so was the next guy? What?
> So he was willing to do what Microsoft asked?
No. Balk = stop and return on your steps. He was moving towards ”migrating more than 14000 PCs in public administration to Linux”, Gates and Ballmer tried to make him stop, but he continued on his path.
> So not balking means being willing, right?
In this case, willing to proceed with what he was planning to do, that is, moving from Windows to Linux against Microsoft's wishes.
edit: And you're right that this implies "balking at Microsoft's proposal". Personally, I did read the sentence as intended ("they wanted him to balk (= stop his plans), but he did not"), but I can see how the phrasing can be misleading...
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.
Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no?
Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints.
The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is.
And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat.
As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.
Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010.
What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
> It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
Yes, you do have to pick.
Resources are not infinite. European deficits are ballooning, and europe's ability to invest in anything (go further into debt) is constrained by peoples willingness to lend money to European governments at reasonable rates (the bond market)....a willingness which is rapidly collapsing for France, Germany, UK, etc due to lack of growth and underwater social entitlements.
As of right now, there's about 1000X more people working on Microsoft Office than on Frontier AI in Europe. Hence why Europe isn't even near being able to compete with the US and China on the frontier.
Cool that we're re-creating 1990s Microsoft Software in 2026 (why not an EU-native fax machine too? those are still used heavily in 80% of German orgs).
But what will you do if OpenAI/Anthropic/Kimi/GLM cut off your access? The frontier is only going to continue advancing and the openness of the Chinese models will not last forever.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon?
Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million.
Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?
> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees
I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much.
People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees.
I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places.
> Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.
This shows a profound ignorance for how much of modern life, especially within a bureaucracy, is powered by banal software like office suites.
If you can cripple the everyday workings of government, even temporarily, by shutting off access to Microsoft word, then that is a serious security concern. End of story.
I get it, for a forum of people who build software for a living, it's upsetting to confront the idea that the stuff you make doesn't actually matter that much, especially in a post-AI world. Hell, even pre-AI you can just install LibreOffice and it will functionally be the same.
But honestly, if we're comparing ENERGY and FERTILIZER to productivity software, it's no contest as to which is more important for the functioning of modern life.
You cannot vibe code your way out of an energy shortage or switch to 'open-source' fertilizer as soon as tomorrow.
You cannot vibe code your way out of 30+ years of institutional knowledge and processes built on Microsoft Office either.
Given how fragile unreliable those processes are, you probably can without doing much damage. Its not like replacing good quality software with something vibe coded.
> You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine.
Have you missed the news where multiple countries tried to do exactly that and it took either multiple tries or was abandoned? This is very deeply engrained in government and corporate networks (For good reasons like support, backwards compatibility, staffing etc.) but it's not something you can change over night like replacing your parents computer with a Linux version with a similar GUI and hoping all will be fine.
It's very difficult to do it smoothly with no downtime, but all it takes is one emergency for the existing workflows to be thrown out. Companies suffer emergencies and data losses all the time and nothing ever actually happens, they get over it.
> Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success
I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.
> Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft
Corruption unfortunately also happens in Bavaria as this can be seen.
Thankfully Merz is not affiliated with big business at all ... oh wait, nevermind. (One reason why public opinion about him has totally downed. That, as well as his age - old people are often really a bad choice for politics, we can all see this in the USA right now.)
"also"? :D
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amigo-Aff%C3%A4re (sorry, no English translation available)
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?
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).
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.
https://opensource.muenchen.de/sabbatical.html
> 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!
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).
1: https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#ope...
Agreed, they should hire an army of consultants to select a proprietary software replacement that the city will pay for but not own, having to pay ongoing license fees for ongoing use. Much more efficient ant fair that way.
LibreOffice uses libexpat (https://libexpat.github.io/doc/users/), and one of the major issues with using OSS in public administration is that there is still no open source office suite that can compete with M$ Office...
> The City of Munich follows the principle of Public Money, Public Code: Whenever possible, software developed in-house should be released as open source. The goal is not only to ensure the city’s own IT security but also to enable others to reuse the software securely, transparently, and in a traceable way.[1]
[1] https://opensource.muenchen.de/security.html
> 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
I'm curious. Do you have more information?
Sure.
Nixpkgs cross support for Windows has been in there a while. Native windows support for Nix is a bit less advertised because it is pre-release/pre-MVP-on-master, but see https://github.com/nix-windows/nix-windows-demo . And expect to hear more on this in the next few weeks :).
One thing XML is very good for is semantic documents adhering to a well defined schema - and it's one of the few commonly used text-based data storage formats that do it well (with XSD, DTDs are pretty terrible). Unfortunately the only library that currently implements validation is libxml2 - expat is way nicer, but it never supported it. I don't understand why most XML libraries do not implement validation - XML sucks as a plain data storage format anyway.
I had a good experience with DITA based tools when writing technical documentation a few years ago, and there are enough graphical tools for a Word like experience.
Related discussion of the maintainer stepping down from libxml2 support. libexpat is a different library of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196
10 months ago | 119 comments
Also related:
https://xkcd.com/2347/
What’s happens after 6 months?
nothing. its a 10 year old project. i guess they'll stop receiving funding from Munich? thats about it.
It’s a 28 year old project.
That's good. Every country should do something similar.
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
Love it! More please!
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Cities shouldn't fund the software they rely on?
Cities need a lot of things - should they fund everything?
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.
Nobody whines when they overpay millions to Microsoft for trash software. Fund one tiny project and everybody loses their mind.
Yes, because if they need them, they won't function without them
Yes.
yes
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.
Chrome uses libexpat for XML parsing, not XSLT.
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.
I'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.
No I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I don’t need to “find a better argument here” because the pathetic WHATWG cowards never did. They were divisive about it just to be divisive and impose their brain dead opinion on the world. So I am returning that logical approach to their “improvement” of the web.
Interesting. What sorts of projects did you use XSLT for? I used it once to transform some XSD schema documents into HTML for presentation, but it would've been pretty trivial to do the same in JS in browser, or Python for offline transformation. It didn't seem like that amazing of a technology in my experience. Curious to hear what you liked so much about it.
I enjoy it because of it’s simplicity and ability to essentially ship a compiled template built from “components” (XSLT templates) that rendered much more quickly without having to wait for JS to load and render. That you could ship someone a tar of Xml documents and have them rendered entirely client side. If you spend time with XSLT you will see it was essentially React JSX before React in a lot of ways without all the cruft. Then if you still needed JS functionality you could layer that on top. But the main benefit being that you did not have to EVER worry about implementing “trivial” rendering for templates at all and the templates could be mapped to much more simpler data documents (XML). For all the good advice about separating data from design online and using compiled templates, XSLT gets a bad rap because XML has a bunch of other features unrelated to it that people use that can be complex. But then why does XSLT have to be deprecated if the problems are actually with XML?
And for the record if they’re removing it for “security” reasons I think that means that the performant XSLT rendering is not trivial at all. I would love to see the trivial code for rendering those documents in JS because I don’t believe it. If it’s so trivial then it should be a no brainer to ship such a thing with every browser. Or if “security” issues are that big of deal why not create a new XSLT standard for HTML that removes the XML issues?
There are many sites that still use it but since it’s a way to eschew JS by using modern CSS + XSLT, obviously Google wants it gone.
I really don’t understand how React JSX gets praise praise praise (regardless evangelization) but the similar technology that was even better and earlier than it is somehow not impressive.
I used it for all my personal projects, single page sites, multi-page sites, sites that required multiple template types, and for shipping a tar of documents. The beauty being that I didn’t need a CMS or framework to essentially create documents that can be composed of reuseable components/blocks.
I was working on a project that used Redbean and XSLT+XML documents to create shippable binaries that were instantly viewable in the browser, but I have halted that project as Google has won by creating the stigma Kool-aid around it. This will be my RSS hill to die on.