Is that what is happening here? Intel's explanation of "The Management" handing down orders doesn't imply technical reasons were the motivation. It's unclear.
If there are technical reasons - like the one you mentioned - let's hear them, they might be valid.
I don't think I mentioned any technical reason? Allocating developer time is generally a management decision.
If anything, Intel has already put their resources into Wayland and the lack of any good technical reasons for Mir's existence probably played a large role in their decision.
I don't see why this is so shocking really, many other projects in the Linux graphics stack have already said that they won't be supporting Mir upstream any time soon. At this point, I'd be more surprised of hearing a project supporting Mir than the other way around.
You still see no attempt at humor or lightheartedness in this? May I remind you that his email ends in .co.uk, so many people may need to apply a "British humour filter". Most of his commits have "Signed-off-by:" with a name; he replaced "signed-off" with "ordered" and the name with a vague reference to "The Management".
I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond the commits. No, I see no humor or lightheartedness. Signed-off-by is not just something Chris made up, it's a pseudo-standardized line for git commit messages.
Further context I'm aware of is that Chris explicitly accepted and applied the patch after working with the developers to get it right, along with other signs of cooperation.
Yet more context I'm aware of is much of the political bullshit surrounding Mir, Wayland, Canonical, Red Hat, Intel and really the entire FOSS community at this point.
This isn't a joke. This is Intel's management intervening.
> I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond the commits.
Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit. (If your comment tells the whole story I am unconvinced. OK, so the guy merged a patch, then it turns out he did not in fact have the blessing of his employer, so he reverted it with a slightly snarky commit message. Any more context I should be aware of beyond that? It does not sound like a huge conspiracy to me.)
Edit: also, what does "The Management" mean? This guy's immediate supervisor? Intel CEO? I feel like some people are taking an oddly paranoid reading of the situation. I don't know anything about Intel specifically but I have worked at a large company, I am willing to bet that the higher you get in Intel's management the less they care about Ubuntu.
Canonical wrote the initial patches. It stands to reason they will also be fairly heavily involved in maintaining them. That's a fairly thin argument against incorporating patches upstream.
Almost by definition, most of the patches I've committed to upstream are things that I was the first person to care enough about to write a patch. It's nice to see other people use them, but the idea that "why should upstream carry your patch when you are the only one that cares about it" is a bit counter to what has made FOSS get this far. Especially when "only they care about it" still represents one of the largest blocks of users.
I'm sure upstream would be more willing to work with Mir if there was technical reasons for its existence. As it stands, Mir provides no benefit to anyone but Canonical, who simply want control. That control comes at the cost of fragmenting a fragile part of the ecosystem. You can't expect the rest of the community to be okay with that.
If there are technical reasons - like the one you mentioned - let's hear them, they might be valid.