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.

The 6 month open source sabbatical is something any external developers can apply to (with a specific Open Source project and an Idea what to do), and the city selects among the candidates. They do explain why they picked libexpat[1] (google translate works well enough for the site).

1: https://opensource.muenchen.de/de/software/libexpat.html#ope...

Agreed, they should hire an army of consultants to select a proprietary software replacement that the city will pay for but not own, having to pay ongoing license fees for ongoing use. Much more efficient ant fair that way.

LibreOffice uses libexpat (https://libexpat.github.io/doc/users/), and one of the major issues with using OSS in public administration is that there is still no open source office suite that can compete with M$ Office...