City of Munich Funds libexpat Maintenance for Up to 6 Months
libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
The maintainer of libexpat, a widely used C XML parser, announces that he is now employed by the City of Munich's Open Source Sabbatical program. For the first time in a decade, he can work on the project as his regular job. Priorities include fixing five known vulnerabilities, adding XML 1.0r5 support, and improving robustness. He also seeks help with Clang-based MinGW and AddressSanitizer integration.
For the first time, I am now being employed to work on maintaining libexpat as my "regular job" for a limited period of time.
- weinzierl
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/
- wxw
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!
- Ericson2314
> 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
- kristianp
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:
- andsoitis
What’s happens after 6 months?