libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
Ranked #1 on Hacker News with 41 points and 2 comments.
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:
Fixing the currently 5 known unfixed vulnerabilities
Further improving the robustness and maintainability of the project
Yesterday and today most of my time went into fixing a vulnerability uncovered by Mozilla .