Nick Wellnhofer is stepping away from libxml2 after a decade of unpaid maintenance. He’s forking it under the AGPL, but that will probably scare off most corporate users.

Meanwhile libxml2 is still everywhere. Without someone with real backing, a core piece of infrastructure is about to go unmaintained.

Once again, the open-source funding problem is laid bare: the internet runs on the unpaid evenings of a few people until they burn out (add relevant reference from XKCD, obviously).

(A)GPL licences are the way to go if you want to maintain the sanity long term…

"Expected effort required to maintain implementation" should be an evaluation criteria when selecting technologies. Thousand page RFCs do not make sustainable standards in the long run. Most committee designed specs end up in this category. People are impressed by complexity but actively pursuing simplicity is what we should be doing.

With not enough time to develop an alternative and too many application ecosystems relying on this library, I think it's a matter of time before a large company forks the library to fix security issues with it now that they have no choice but to do the work themselves. At least until IBM and Google figure out a way to move away from this library.

True. It'd be illuminating to know how far and wide it is used. It was always been my go-to library for parsing XML in a number of languages.

https://xkcd.com/2347