> 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.

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]."

Baulk - refuse to comply

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.

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).

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.

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.

It’s a 28 year old project.

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.