[caryhartline]

Here is the full quote that the author is taking these quotes from:

> +Martin Kozub we have lots of IoT projects using Mir as a compositor so that code continues to receive investment. I agree, it's a very fast, clean and powerful graphics composition engine, and smart people love it for that.

> The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available.

> I came to be disgusted with the hate on Mir. Really, it changed my opinion of the free software community.

> I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fuck that shit.

[jasonkostempski]

>The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence.

He seems to imply iOS/Andoid competition and compositing/convergence have something to do with each other. Neither iOS or Android have it. Windows 10 Phone has it, but no one is buying those, so it's obviously not the killer feature he thinks it is. The complaint is that a ton of resources are being wasted around a feature no one asked for. Phone sized computer with a blob of icons that runs 1 application at a time, without the walled garden, make sure C/C++ code can be utilized, that's all anyone is asking for. Developers will deal with having to redo the UI for their application, it's not a problem that needs solving anytime soon. No walled garden is the feature that would set Canonical apart, there's no need for a silly gimmick to entice potential buyers.

[gue5t]

I really don't understand this stance. I try to keep current on Wayland implementation work and was around when the Mir debacle was originally going down (and prior to it, when Canonical stated they would contribute to and use Wayland!).

Writing a competing implementation when you could simply (and announced you would!) contribute to an existing open-source project, then publishing articles with misleading and vague FUD (about the Wayland input stack, which is really just the upstream Linux input stack), when the only reason not to collaborate is to shipping your phone spin quicker while reusing closed-source drivers... is plenty to deserve the response Mir got. It reeks of a get-rich-quick scheme that will divide the graphics infrastructure work on Linux in half while introducing unmaintainable code stuck to an old, frozen, unfixable design. Letting closed-source blobs dictate the design decisions of open-source products results in crippled products and unresolvable technical debt.

If Canonical did not have any intent to profit from deploying Mir, they could have taken the time to work out with the Wayland developers exactly how to make Wayland flexible enough to suit everyone's needs. I'm still not convinced that it isn't, but I'm not an expert on Android graphics infrastructure and there may be some technical hitches. In particular, see the following (in rough reverse chronological order):

This statement of technical reasons it isn't possible to correctly (every pixel in every frame on screen is deterministic) implement a Wayland environment on top of libhybris: http://web.archive.org/web/20141203070549/http://www.jlekstr...

Articles and demonstrations about Wayland compositors running atop libhybris: https://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-a... http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/search/label/android

I guess Mir just gives up on the goal that "every frame is perfect". The right thing for Canonical to do would have been to pour some of its significant capital into funding reverse-engineering efforts to develop open-source drivers for Android hardware. This would benefit the GNU/Linux ecosystem, the Android ecosystem, and device vendors (who wouldn't have to act as middle-men between GPU vendors and consumers for software updates). And we'd get features that are considered impossible today.

But the huge cost of GPU reverse-engineering wouldn't have helped Canonical's bottom line.