Intel Continues To Divest In Wayland

In the earlier days of Wayland, Intel was known for contributing a lot of resources toward this next-generation display technology to unseat the X.Org Server, but these days their contributions have been minimal.

While Wayland 1.9 is coming next month, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center hasn't had much of a hand in the development of this new version along with the Weston 1.9 compositor. Wayland's releases continue to be managed by Bryce Harrington over at Samsung's open-source group.

For reasons seemingly not explained publicly, Intel's contributions to Wayland have greatly diminished. It's also been over one year since Kristian Høgsberg, the founder of Wayland/Weston, was last active with Wayland development who is employed by Intel.

For trying to put some stats behind Intel's downward Wayland spiral, embedded below is a look at the number of intel.com/linux.intel.com email addresses active on Wayland's mailing list each month for the trailing 30 months:

2015 August: 1
2015 July: 1
2015 June: 0
2015 May: 2
2015 April: 1
2015 March: 0
2015 February: 2
2015 January: 1
2014 December: 2
2014 November: 2
2014 October: 1
2014 September: 4
2014 August: 5
2014 July: 3
2014 June: 3
2014 May: 6
2014 April: 7
2014 March: 5
2014 February: 6
2014 January: 3
2013 December: 5
2013 November: 9
2013 October: 10
2013 September: 8
2013 August: 7
2013 July: 10
2013 June: 13
2013 May: 9
2013 April: 7
2013 March: 6

This year there's just been one or two (or no one!) each month from Intel being active on the Wayland mailing list, compared to last year when it was a few, or back in 2013 when it was upwards of a dozen Intel OTC developers each month working on Wayland.

I don't have any official explanation for this change at Intel, but if any Phoronix readers do, feel free to post a comment in the forums or message me. And it's not that Wayland is feature-complete and deployed across the board across all desktop Linux distributions... At least Intel still has dozens of others working on the open-source Linux graphics stack.