One of the lead developers on the Mir project at Canonical, Alan Griffiths, has finally opened up about this week's news of Ubuntu dropping efforts around Unity 8 and switching back to GNOME. This also is pretty much definitive that Mir is being dropped and Ubuntu will end up making use of Wayland.

Alan Griffith's blog post today pretty much confirms what we've been expecting that they aren't planning to draw up any crazy ambitious plans to use Mir under GNOME or anything along those lines. In the post he basically expresses hope that anyone planning to fork or maintain Unity 8 would also bring Mir with them and make use of it rather than porting Unity 8 to Wayland.

Alan explains there are two plausible evolutions of the Mir dream and that's to reconcile it with Wayland. His (admittedly biased) hope is to add support to libmirserver for Wayland clients while keeping the existing protocol. Or another approach would be getting QtMir/MirAL in effect running on the Wayland server and then to "junk Mir."

He shared these thoughts this morning in a post entitled The end of a dream?