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.

I'm curious. Do you have more information?

nothing. its a 10 year old project. i guess they'll stop receiving funding from Munich? thats about it.

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)

By "balk" did you instead mean "budge"? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?

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).

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?

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.

It’s a 28 year old project.

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).

Chrome uses libexpat for XML parsing, not XSLT.

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]."

> 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.

Baulk - refuse to comply

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.

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.

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. 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.

Also, 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, hardware, mining) in favor of handouts for domestic weapons manufacturing.

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...

> 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".

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.

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"

> 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?

> 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?

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.