Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive? Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.
> Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive?
Something like this is actually quite common, and more or less necessary.
In proprietary software development, there is typically some hierarchical authority that makes design decisions. You might debate for a while, but eventually someone is going to come up with a decision of how things are going to be done. In FOSS, no such central authority exists, so design of inter-related projects is effectively a distributed negotiation. Usually, things are done amicably, everyone is happy to share each other's code, and disputes are handled peacefully. However, every now and then there is a situation where two entities simply cannot agree, and one of them has to put the foot down and say: "No, this is a bad idea, we won't spend the effort helping you do this. If you want it, do it yourself."
And since it's all a very public negotiation, making this kind of announcement is just one step up the ladder of escalation from a private email declining a patch. As flames go, it's rather tame. :)
> Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.
Intel absolutely can, and has, for hundreds of times over the past few months. At some time you just have to give up on trying to convince the other people and do something useful.
I do not know this code but the diff, posted elsewhere in this thread, looks more than trivial to me. Such changes tend to have maintenance cost. If the original authors don't care about the functionality and aren't testing it, it's probably not worth keeping, as they may go through great pains to leave it in and still end up breaking it frequently.
It's not as if Canonical's approach was exactly uncontroversial either. My reaction to the Mir announcement was not exactly that I was overwhelmed by warm fuzzies, to put it that way, because I think they should collaborate on Wayland rather than doing their own thing for something as central as the display server.
Something like this is actually quite common, and more or less necessary.
In proprietary software development, there is typically some hierarchical authority that makes design decisions. You might debate for a while, but eventually someone is going to come up with a decision of how things are going to be done. In FOSS, no such central authority exists, so design of inter-related projects is effectively a distributed negotiation. Usually, things are done amicably, everyone is happy to share each other's code, and disputes are handled peacefully. However, every now and then there is a situation where two entities simply cannot agree, and one of them has to put the foot down and say: "No, this is a bad idea, we won't spend the effort helping you do this. If you want it, do it yourself."
And since it's all a very public negotiation, making this kind of announcement is just one step up the ladder of escalation from a private email declining a patch. As flames go, it's rather tame. :)
> Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.
Intel absolutely can, and has, for hundreds of times over the past few months. At some time you just have to give up on trying to convince the other people and do something useful.