Nick Wellnhofer has officially retired from his role as a maintainer of the widely used library, libxml2. Although he announced his departure in September, it was only recently that he made his retirement official. Following Nick’s exit, Daniel Garcia Moreno, an employee of SUSE, and Iván Chavero, founder of NorTK and former Red Hat employee, have been added as maintainers to the project after contributing changes to libxml2 in the past. This decision has led to the resolution of an issue regarding the lack of maintainers for the project.
Since 2016, Nick Wellnhofer has played a key role in the development of libxml2 and was officially added as a maintainer in 2022. Throughout his time with the project, he was the primary active developer. The libxml2 library is utilized by various operating systems and products from major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Additionally, several open packages, including GNOME, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon, Budgie, LibreOffice, and many others, rely on libxml2 as a dependency.
Nick’s approach to addressing vulnerabilities and his views on volunteer maintainers have sparked concerns among some community members. These issues were reportedly a factor in Google’s decision to discontinue support for XSLT in Chromium. Nick’s shift in attitude towards vulnerability management and criticism of companies’ expectations for volunteers have raised questions about the future direction of libxml2.