libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
blog.hartwork.org317 points by spyc 2 days ago
317 points by spyc 2 days ago
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.
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.
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?