Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

blog.hartwork.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#51

Post by nbadg »

pembrook wrote: post #45
dewey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 (…

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.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#52

Post by Someone »

dataflow wrote: post #47
cygx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#53

Post by mjdv »

dataflow wrote: post #46
cygx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 " balk" = " stop" = " refuse to proceed", right? " refuse to proceed" with Microsof…

The thing he " refuse to proceed" with was LiMux, his project for moving away from Microsoft.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#54

Post by rob74 »

weinzierl wrote: post #3

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…

"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.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#55

Post by pembrook »

nbadg wrote: post #51
pembrook wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

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.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#56

Post by qalmakka »

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.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#57

Post by rob74 »

vasco wrote: post #31
ayanb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#58

Post by [deleted] »

dataflow wrote: post #47
cygx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#59

Post by wasmitnetzen »

pembrook wrote: post #55
nbadg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 funct…

You cannot vibe code your way out of 30+ years of institutional knowledge and processes built on Microsoft Office either.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#60

Post by dewey »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #50
pembrook wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

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 w…

> 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.

Post reply on HN