[krschultz]

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.

[mayhew]

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.