Shuttleworth On Mir: "A Fantastic Piece of Engineering"

[valeriodean]

Exactly!

Kwin maintainer says that Kwin won't(!) support Mir - and even if someone would post a patch, he would veto it(!), just like that, in advance, he just made his mind to not support THE most popular distribution outthere. Imagine that Mark would said they won't support KDE in any way and if someone posts a patch he is going to veto it, there would be outrage, OUTRAGE! I tell you!

But this pompous Kwin maintainer gets to do exactly that, he is the bully and he is the one causing infighting, division and fragmentation here in this instance, NOT Canonical.

So why is everybody okay with that? I have no idea ... there are really just Canonical haters who hate anything that Canonical makes not for its merits but for their feelings toward Ubuntu/Canonical. That's not to say Canonical doesn't make bad decisions, it does, but they should be called out specifically and not blanket every possible thing that comes out from them. Gosh!

English is not my native language but seems like I can undestand it better than you.
If your english skill not allow you to recognize the difference between *even if someone would post a patch, he would veto it* and *even if someone would post a patch distro-specific, he would veto it*, you can try with the math.

[a user]

Nope, he is saying that he will veto distro specific patches, regardless of the distro. Which is the way they have done it before, he didn't come up with that now just because he doesn't like Mir (which he by the way also is not saying, he justr doesn't want distro specific patches).

will he suport patches for wayland? i do not think that ALL distro will switch to wyland, especially not at the same time. hence supporting wayland would be distro specific like supporting mir would be,... or not.

[xeekei]

will he suport patches for wayland? i do not think that ALL distro will switch to wyland, especially not at the same time. hence supporting wayland would be distro specific like supporting mir would be,... or not.

Pretty much everyone will switch to Wayland. It has been the plan for years now, it's the unanimously planned replacement for X.org. Canonical made up some lies/misconceptions about Wayland in order to defend the decision to make an in-house solution, because they want the control. They want to be the Linus Torvalds of the display server.

[erendorn]

This is actually the reason that makes me support Mir rather than Wayland, it annoyed me to no end that such a core component of a supposedly free/libre OS is not GPL licensed and is open to corporate abuse. The only thing that is holding Linux together is the fact that the Linux kernel is GPL, if it was not, we would have hundreds of offshoots and fragmented proprietary derivatives each pitching their unique special candy proprietary technology that separates them from the rest which would make the core stagnate and be nothing more than a "base" for all the proprietary offshoots - point in case BSD and OS X.

That's absolutely non true. An open source software made by one party (ie, a small project) may be at risk of being abused. A big project supported by multiple players is not, because if you fork it, you get to maintain the contributions of all the others (while they do it for you if you contribute to upstream). You actually get more corporate support, as they are less scared of the license.
That's why there are no significant closed source forks of the Apache server or LLVM/Clang.

The best example if probably the the X Window system, which I doubt that it being MIT made Linux more open to corporate abuse, or more subject to proprietary anything.

I'm not saying that the GPL is bad, it certainly isn't. But permissive licenses certainly ain't bad either.

[j-kidd]

You know what Canonical/Ubuntu brought Linux? Public Awareness. In the mind of the consumer, Ubuntu = Linux. If Ubuntu never came around, Linux would still be in the same state in was in 2005, holding <.5% market share, nothing more then a toy OS.

Public awareness my ass. The whole pie has been shrinking ever since Ubuntu started presenting itself as The Linux: http://www.google.com/trends/explore...0ubuntu&cmpt=q

[Libreman]

You don't seem to know what licence X11 use, or why the MIT licence was invented in the first place. And Mir isn't just GPL-licensed, it has Canonical's usual CLA twist. Which nullifies much of the GPL in the first place.

And you seem to assume a lot of stuff you know nothing about, like what I know and what I don't. I'm perfectly aware of the X11 license, that's why I said I was annoyed by it. And while the CLA in unfortunate, its less bad than so-called "permissive" license which gives anybody and everybody the right to abuse users by taking the freedom which many value (albeit not all, including you it seems) from them by the way of proprietary software.

[Kite]

...

Calm down people. We don't need a fight, we need to get together and create
good software. Even if Mir fails, Canonical may succeed in having Nvidia provide
a driver for it, a driver that will most likely also work on Wayland.

...

Explain why you think an Nvidia driver will support both Mir and Wayland. This, I think, is central to the opinion you've taken up; if this were the case, of course, then Wayland and Mir could easily coexist. Not having Canonical's support for Wayland certainly is not helpful, but it does not otherwise harm Wayland. If this is not the case, then Wayland and Mir are in direct competition with each other for driver support, and the introduction of Mir duplicates the expense of developing Linux drivers for Nvidia. They then either bear twice the expense or take sides, which is a death knell for the other (unless AMD picks it up, and then we have a situation where we have GPU-specific distros; not ideal). Furthermore, Nvidia seems more likely to support Wayland, given the Optimus issues that copyleft licensing has caused them. And Intel provided much of the development force behind Wayland, so I hardly see them deciding to put a bunch of resources into developing a driver for Mir.

[Alex Sarmiento]

I think Canonical is the best Linux Company ever. Sadly, most developers and "journalist" are just a buch of mediocre whiners

[Ericg]

I think Canonical is the best Linux Company ever. Sadly, most developers and "journalist" are just a buch of mediocre whiners

Umm....RedHat? You know, the company that actually pushed their changes upstream instead of keeping massive delta-patches so that EVERYONE can benefit instead of just 1 company? The company that pushed things to fd.o so that people can collaborate? The company that puts its weight behind projects and says "We're doing this. You guys can do that. Your choice. But we're doing this."

[Libreman]

You actually get more corporate support, as they are less scared of the license.
That's why there are no significant closed source forks of the Apache server or LLVM/Clang.

The best example if probably the the X Window system, which I doubt that it being MIT made Linux more open to corporate abuse, or more subject to proprietary anything.

I'm not saying that the GPL is bad, it certainly isn't. But permissive licenses certainly ain't bad either.

Corporate support is a double edged sword, it may make the project move faster but it also changes direction ... and moving faster means little when it's in the wrong direction. GPL does not exclude corporate support at all - see Linux kernel, Red Hat etc. it just excludes the bad kind of corporate support, the one which has the intention to take away your software freedoms.

The question is what does "less scared of the license" actually mean? If you're more scared of a license that protects user's freedom more, then what does that say about you? It says the users should be more scared about you!

And if there are no significant closed source forks of a certain project then what's the point of "permissive" license exactly? Why not GPL then?

All in all I'm not at all convinced by these arguments, I've listening to them and thinking about them for a long time but they don't seem to make sense. Companies that are less scared of a license that gives them the right to take it's users freedoms away have an intention or at least open mind about doing exactly that - that's a bad signal for the user.

And if "permissive" license does not result in significant proprietary forks then what's the point of it? Why allow something you do not expect to have any beneficial effect anyway (and are allowing a lot of harmful effects).

It just does not make sense.