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

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

#61

Post by graemep »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #59
pembrook wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#62

Post by dewey »

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 (…

> 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.

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

#63

Post by cygx »

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 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...

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

#64

Post by sajithdilshan »

dewey wrote: post #60
sajithdilshan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#66

Post by shevy-java »

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…

> 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.)

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

#67

Post by dewey »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #64
dewey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

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

#68

Post by PhilipRoman »

dewey wrote: post #62
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 (…

> 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 c…

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.

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

#69

Post by pembrook »

dewey wrote: post #60
sajithdilshan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#70

Post by pjmlp »

OtomotO wrote: post #23
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…

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.

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