Canonical's Mir Project Retracts Wayland Criticism

[aavci]

Actually, this entire thing is happening just to generate more ad revenue at phoronix. Nice work, Canonical!

Well, this is more logical than the technical reasons behind mir. Maybe they even have a revenue sharing deal with phoronix.

[liam]

Until it forces mir on everybody and everybody will use it. They have push, wayland doesn't. Most users don't care so most users will use mir since canonical says so. Wayland will be dead on arrival for the simple fact that Ubuntu is the most popular and Canonical will choose mir over wayland.

Actually, Ubuntu has almost no push b/c they don't make much money, and they don't have serious engineering resources to push things. Think about how little of their contributions have actually percolated to the larger ecosystem. One can argue that they tries to upstream them, but that ignores the point that they wouldn't need to if the changes had been interesting enough on their own. Upstart was their biggest success, IMHO, and that got utterly trampled upon by systemd in very quick order.
I'm convinced Canonical is going to be gone within 5 years (Ubuntu will be around somewhat longer).

[MartinN]

This is your opportunity to seize the moment by declaring your allegiance to Wayland/XWayland - and earn thousands of fans/followers/users/developers right now.

Wayland played their cards right, and with their attitude even attracted the X developers to join in. X is not a -complete- throwaway, despite what Canonical slightly suggested in the original press release which I read, while aiming at Wayland.

There are -many- solid concepts in X, when properly distilled, transformed and reapplied to Wayland, can carry Wayland a light year further than it did X, while carrying X on its back.

The only reason Canonical is pursuing this "Peace" display server is because they are trying to be too eclectic, a la Apple style, to cultivate a certain image, possibly move away from their "freemium" model and/or make a buck and a dime off Linux. There's nothing wrong with that - but in my view, it won't happen while they are creating division in such a fundamental piece as a display server, by suffering from the NIH syndrome that is all too known to the Linux fanbase/developers.

If Canonical wants to stand on developer's toes instead of their shoulders, then let them - it's a guaranteed bite me in the ass comeback/ROI...when they go from a top ranking distro to a bottom ranking one.

[blackout23]

Actually, Ubuntu has almost no push b/c they don't make much money, and they don't have serious engineering resources to push things. Think about how little of their contributions have actually percolated to the larger ecosystem. One can argue that they tries to upstream them, but that ignores the point that they wouldn't need to if the changes had been interesting enough on their own. Upstart was their biggest success, IMHO, and that got utterly trampled upon by systemd in very quick order.
I'm convinced Canonical is going to be gone within 5 years (Ubuntu will be around somewhat longer).

It doesn't make much money? It doesn't make ANY money. They are making a loss year after year.
http://www.internetnews.com/blog/ske...rofitable.html

Quite amusing how Ubuntu fans think that Canonical is this super company that can boss other companies around to have them the suck their dick.
Tell me how many movies have you watched on your Ubuntu TVs recently? And how's your Ubuntu Phone going? Any carrier support yet? No?
Well Firefox OS got 18 companies on its bandwagon just for comparison.

Ask yourself just one time. What if Canonical fails with their Mobile vision? They'll have neglected the desktop in the mean time. Do you guys think they'll come crawling back admitting defeat or maybe give up Ubuntu for good, because it's a total money drain for Shuttleworth?

[Tweenk]

Note that Canonical's Contributor License Agreement strongly discourages code collaboration. Requiring copyright assignment is pretty rare, and even rarer still when the assignee can take the code proprietary. It also discourages working together since it puts everyone not the assignee on a considerably lower footing.

Free Software Foundation also requires such an assignment for some of their projects (e.g. GCC). Just saying.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

[chenxiaolong]

Free Software Foundation also requires such an assignment for some of their projects (e.g. GCC). Just saying.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

I'm just going to hijack your conversation here

Section 2.3 of Canonical's agreement says this:

Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We
include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the
Contribution under any license, including copyleft,
permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. As a
condition on the exercise of this right, We agree to also
license the Contribution under the terms of the license or
licenses which We are using for the Material on the
Submission Date.

They have the right to make the software proprietary, but it must be in addition the license of the software when the contribution was accepted. Unless I'm misunderstanding this, since Mir is licensed under the LGPL and GPL, they could never dual license it with a proprietary license.

If what I said is true, I'm not worried about the CLA.

[johnc]

This is your opportunity to seize the moment by declaring your allegiance to Wayland/XWayland - and earn thousands of fans/followers/users/developers right now.

Wayland played their cards right, and with their attitude even attracted the X developers to join in. X is not a -complete- throwaway, despite what Canonical slightly suggested in the original press release which I read, while aiming at Wayland.

There are -many- solid concepts in X, when properly distilled, transformed and reapplied to Wayland, can carry Wayland a light year further than it did X, while carrying X on its back.

The only reason Canonical is pursuing this "Peace" display server is because they are trying to be too eclectic, a la Apple style, to cultivate a certain image, possibly move away from their "freemium" model and/or make a buck and a dime off Linux. There's nothing wrong with that - but in my view, it won't happen while they are creating division in such a fundamental piece as a display server, by suffering from the NIH syndrome that is all too known to the Linux fanbase/developers.

If Canonical wants to stand on developer's toes instead of their shoulders, then let them - it's a guaranteed bite me in the ass comeback/ROI...when they go from a top ranking distro to a bottom ranking one.

The thing is, Canonical wasn't interested in getting the lion's share of the 1% of Linux desktop users out there. They were trying to go after people that weren't Linux users and broaden the base.

As it is now the other Linux distros are just wallowing around with the 1% as none of them seem interested (or, more likely, capable) of creating a user experience that isn't a complete turd.

It's a shame that Steam has come at the least fortunate time: we don't have a non-turd Linux desktop yet for the common person, though Ubuntu was the closest to getting there.

[duby229]

The thing is, Canonical wasn't interested in getting the lion's share of the 1% of Linux desktop users out there. They were trying to go after people that weren't Linux users and broaden the base.

As it is now the other Linux distros are just wallowing around with the 1% as none of them seem interested (or, more likely, capable) of creating a user experience that isn't a complete turd.

It's a shame that Steam has come at the least fortunate time: we don't have a non-turd Linux desktop yet for the common person, though Ubuntu was the closest to getting there.

I truly hate this 1% crap.... The reality is that it's at least 2.3%...

230%.. When talking about anything 230% is alot...

EDIT: And that doesnt even capture the whole picture. I'm an american and MS dominates this market.But if you look at market shares by locality there are places where local marketshare numbers for linux is significantly higher than that.

[johnc]

I truly hate this 1% crap.... The reality is that it's at least 2.3%...

230%.. When talking about anything 230% is alot...

Ok.

2.3%.

[MartinN]

The thing is, Canonical wasn't interested in getting the lion's share of the 1% of Linux desktop users out there. They were trying to go after people that weren't Linux users and broaden the base.

As it is now the other Linux distros are just wallowing around with the 1% as none of them seem interested (or, more likely, capable) of creating a user experience that isn't a complete turd.

It's a shame that Steam has come at the least fortunate time: we don't have a non-turd Linux desktop yet for the common person, though Ubuntu was the closest to getting there.

I agree. Some are vying for "leaving Linux to be the best in its niche" - running on rackmounts in dark, cold server rooms of all corporations, being the backbone of the Internet - but I am for Linux taking over the desktop, assassinating both OS X and Windows over the long run because of their complacency or if not outright assassinating them, then at least competing with both on an equal footing.

It is a future in which your and my desktop is controlled by no one specific corporation due to its licensing nature - God Protection License (GPL , and everyone gets out of it as much as they put into it - it's for our collective benefit rather than a group's or individual's.

Linux needs a solid desktop BADLY if it's going to become commonplace/commoditized - X isn't it, never was and never will be. Wayland is the seed that we need to nurture, and Mir and the like is the cancer we need to irradiate out of existence (no offense to any of the Mir developers - it's just that their leadership has gotten too self-centered, IMHO).