libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
The City of Munich is funding the maintenance of the libexpat XML parser for six months through an Open Source Sabbatical program. The maintainer plans to focus on fixing security vulnerabilities and improving project robustness.
Why it matters
This highlights the importance of public sector support for critical open-source infrastructure that underpins global software systems.
libexpat is a fast streaming XML parser. Alongside libxml2, Expat is one of the most widely used software libre XML parsers written in C, specifically C99. It is cross-platform and licensed under the MIT license .
Starting 2026-08-01, the "security vacation" of the project has ended and(!) I will be be paid to work on maintaining libexpat for up to 6 months thanks to the City of Munich under the umbrella of their Open Source Sabbatical program. What does that mean?
For much of the past 10 years, working on libexpat has been competing with my regular occupation as a software engineer, chores, social life and re-creation. For the first time, I am now being employed to work on maintaining libexpat as my "regular job" for a limited period of time. My top priorities will be:
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