Shuttleworth Challenged Over Mir Comments

[hiryu]

Yeah, useless for those who wanna close the code and to those who want to abuse FOSS for making money. Nobody cares.

I hate Mir probably even more than any average FOSS community member next to me and I still find your posts outright disgusting. Attempting to use the community disappointment with Canonical as a veil that should obscure how groundless your anti-GPLv3 remarks are exposes you not only as a troll (we have enough of your kind here) but as a very dangerous troll.

So let me just reiterate what others have already said: your anti-GPL rhetorics is based on nothing, you have zero credibility and the only thing you're really trying to do here is spreading FUD. Begone.

Except I'm not anti-GPL at all. Calm down with the knee-jerk reactionism. The issue here is the asymmetry. Mir can still be used in a proprietary fashion, but only when you fork over cash to Canonical. Wayland can be used in this fashion by anyone. The playing field is level with Wayland. The truth is, quite a few companies are adverse to the GPLv3 whether you or I like the license or not. Even when they're entirely okay with the GPLv2.

No, useless for those who are in that group and aren't already a big company able to pay Canonical.

Also, the quoted claim is true, GPLv3 is useless for a lot of cases, where they need or want to close up the source code. What is arguable is if we really want to care about those use cases. I do not. I mean, if they don't care about us (and the ones who give them the code), why should we care for them? However, there are people who are willing to give their code and do not expect anything back, and those people are far better using a BSD-like license, and they should be respected as well.

mrugiero's post is entirely correct. There is the issue of whether we want to care about those use cases. However, the point I'm trying to make prodigy_, is that saying Qt and Mir are in the same boat because of their CLA is really an apples and oranges comparison.

[hiryu]

Well, even without going technical, Qt business model is to be usable by as much projects and platforms as possible, while Mir is created to fit Ubuntu and Unity as much specifically as possible.

Open source is good for:
1) knowing what you run
2) fixing issues yourself and tinker
3) sharing efforts and reusing code

Projects that are counterproductive with respect to point 3 always get flak from the community (eg: Android, Tizen, Mir, etc..).

Well said!

I also feel that If Mir had no CLA and kept its current license, they'd be receiving less flak. If they had a CLA but with a more permissive license, they'd also receive less flak.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Never said you couldn't. But lets say company A wants to use Mir in their mobile device. Maybe they need to add some proprietary code in order to make it work. Or perhaps there are some patents that they are unable to share. This means they either pay canonical for a license or use another solution altogether.

If Mir is forked then only the terms of the GPLv3 are available for said fork. This means that the fork will end up being useless for a lot of cases.

Obviously, the same thing happens with all the other licensees available in the planet. No license is going to be useful for everybody in every possible case.
Why then this GPL license have to be so special in this regard?

The license obviously makes sense for for Canonical. The issue there is that it makes sense for absolutely no one else. This is why just about no one else is using it.

That is an hyperbole with no basis. you did not even bother o rationalize that statement. In principle, there should not be any conflict for distributions like fedora and debian to modify and distribute a project like MIR, if you are focusing your attention to the license and the CLA . All linux distributions are perfectly capable and able to distribute and tinkering that software for what ever reason, for instance to offer Unity too. A lot of people LIKE Unity. So if no other distribution wants to offer Unity, then the rest of the linux distribution community might be forcing X number of users to switch to ubuntu, which still offers all the software that other the distributions offer. And that is not really Canonical's fault

This license might not be useful for some people, like Intel. They could create a custom linux distro for a set of appliances or tablets. They could create a proprietary closed fork of Wayland. This IS useless for any other linux distribution. So yes, the license of MIR might be useless for some, but this is not exclusive for MIR and its license and everything depends in the strategies and direction you want to go. Is that simple.

But you're missing the point entirely. My point is that there is a huge difference between Qt and Mir in their licensing. it's disingenuous to compare directly. Qt can be forked under a permissive license and isn't a foundational part of the stack. Digia just doesn't have that big of an advantage.

So to call the KDE devs hypocritical over a pretty different situation is a strawman regardless of whether you love or hate Mir.

Sorry for any typos, etc. I had to type this response from my phone.

Yes, there are differences between QT and MIR, that is why in principle you can COMPARE DIFFERENCES. $diff QT MIR. My point is that there is no basis to spread nonsensical and hypocritical FUD against Canonical or any of its projects. Hypocritical because some KDE developers do not want to hear nonsensical FUD against QT and KDE neither, so they should stop doing it too in the first place.

[hiryu]

Obviously, the same thing happens with all the other licensees available in the planet. No license is going to be useful for everybody in every possible case.
Why then this GPL license have to be so special in this regard?

Asymmetry. There's a lot of rules that everyone but Canonical has to abide by.

That is an hyperbole with no basis. you did not even bother o rationalize that statement. In principle, there should not be any conflict for distributions like fedora and debian to modify and distribute a project like MIR, if you are focusing your attention to the license and the CLA . All linux distributions are perfectly capable and able to distribute and tinkering that software for what ever reason, for instance to offer Unity too. A lot of people LIKE Unity. So if no other distribution wants to offer Unity, then the rest of the linux distribution community might be forcing X number of users to switch to ubuntu, which still offers all the software that other the distributions offer. And that is not really Canonical's fault

This license might not be useful for some people, like Intel. They could create a custom linux distro for a set of appliances or tablets. They could create a proprietary closed fork of Wayland. This IS useless for any other linux distribution. So yes, the license of MIR might be useless for some, but this is not exclusive for MIR and its license and everything depends in the strategies and direction you want to go. Is that simple.

But the license asymmetry will hinder its adoption, like it already has been. How many other distributions have jumped on board and state that they will be using the Mir display server as the primary display server for their distribution? I think there's some potential interest among the xubuntu folks, but that's a derivative to begin with. Is everyone else creating their own custom solutions too? No, they're going with Wayland.

A copyleft license makes a lot of sense (I remember a Haiku developer saying in retrospect that he at least felt that putting EVERYTHING under the MIT license probably wasn't the best idea) in a lot of cases. One exception seems to be when you're trying to create a standard. Wayland is trying to become the standard display.

That's great if Unity/Mir is the solution that works for Canonical. But it's not working for anyone else as of yet, and that's why many are calling it a one distribution standard.

Yes, there are differences between QT and MIR, that is why in principle you can COMPARE DIFFERENCES. $diff QT MIR. My point is that there is no basis to spread nonsensical and hypocritical FUD against Canonical or any of its projects. Hypocritical because some KDE developers do not want to hear nonsensical FUD against QT and KDE neither, so they should stop doing it too in the first place.

QT? QT?! Now you've done it! asdx is going to chime in on this thread and correct you.

Yes you can compare the differences... I've been saying they're different the whole time. In fact that's been my whole point. But you can't say they're different on the one hand and then say it's the same FUD on the other hand. The issues with Mir just aren't the same as the issues with Qt. Therefore using the same arguments against Qt is a strawman and calling the KDE devs hypocritical is nonsensical.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Asymmetry. There's a lot of rules that everyone but Canonical has to abide by.

But what kind of whining is that? The software is totally open source and you can fork it all you want and distribute it all you want! For what kind of special interest is some people decrying about?

But the license asymmetry will hinder its adoption, like it already has been. How many other distributions have jumped on board and state that they will be using the Mir display server as the primary display server for their distribution? I think there's some potential interest among the xubuntu folks, but that's a derivative to begin with. Is everyone else creating their own custom solutions too? No, they're going with Wayland.

So i do not see what the issue really is. If X distribution decides to go for Wayland , MIR or both is up to the X distribution . This can hardly be a valid critic against Canonical.

A copyleft license makes a lot of sense (I remember a Haiku developer saying in retrospect that he at least felt that putting EVERYTHING under the MIT license probably wasn't the best idea) in a lot of cases. One exception seems to be when you're trying to create a standard. Wayland is trying to become the standard display.

It seems to be a good idea if you are behind the development process and the direction of that standard is what please you more. For instance, Intel seems to be totally OK with Wayland and its license. I am sure they have their own reasons.

That's great if Unity/Mir is the solution that works for Canonical. But it's not working for anyone else as of yet, and that's why many are calling it a one distribution standard.

If that is what it ends up to , then that is what it should be. To my knowledge, canonical have no moral, legal nor the strategic obligation to follow a standard it does not want nor does not like. To bad they did not want to devote their resources and money into a project they realized is not exactly what they really want , Canonical should have been more honest with this to begin with, but that is irrelevant by now. Too bad, but get over it and just keep going.

Yes you can compare the differences... I've been saying they're different the whole time. In fact that's been my whole point. But you can't say they're different on the one hand and then say it's the same FUD on the other hand. The issues with Mir just aren't the same as the issues with Qt. Therefore using the same arguments against Qt is a strawman and calling the KDE devs hypocritical is nonsensical.

[/quote]

Of course it is hypocrite , there is not a single good reason to spread FUD with no basis (just pure rationalization ) against canonical the way some KDE developers are doing it. They do not like baseless and nonsensical FUD against Qt nor KDE, me neither, i agree with you. But do not do the same against Canonical and Ubuntu, that would be hypocritical

[hiryu]

But what kind of whining is that? The software is totally open source and you can fork it all you want and distribute it all you want! For what kind of special interest is some people decrying about?

To be honest, my original point was that Qt and Mir aren't really in the same situation and so folks shouldn't claim they're the same. I wasn't really trying to point out problems with Mir. Others have already done this to death.

So i do not see what the issue really is. If X distribution decides to go for Wayland , MIR or both is up to the X distribution . This can hardly be a valid critic against Canonical.

Frankly, I don't think it will be a problem as long as the important software runs on both. If steam games only target one (hopefully they'll all use something such as SDL or whatever else to transparently support both), especially Mir, then we have that much of a problem.

To other people: Yes, I know that such a situation is hardly ideal, but it would prevent a situation where <insert-your-hated-display-manager> gets a nasty advantage. I also think this may probably be less of an issue with games in general as games typically don't need to know too much about the display server or windowing system beneath them. That's why my little SDL OpenGL game project compiles/runs in both windows and linux without and code changes.

If that is what it ends up to , then that is what it should be. To my knowledge, canonical have no moral, legal nor the strategic obligation to follow a standard it does not want nor does not like. To bad they did not want to devote their resources and money into a project they realized is not exactly what they really want , Canonical should have been more honest with this to begin with, but that is irrelevant by now. Too bad, but get over it and just keep going.

There'd be a lot less noise if they had been honest with those reasons to begin with. Instead they provided a lot of technical reasons that were thoroughly debunked in like what? The same day of the Mir announcement? They have their reasons, but none of them are technical. From a technical standpoint, Mir is entirely unnecessary. Had they been honest and just said "Hey, we're going to do our own display server as we want to control all development, and be the sole source of truth for it", they'd be getting far less flak over it. People would still correctly bitch about fragmentation, but as long as stuff like steam games manage to be relatively display server agnostic, we may avoid a lot of that potential damage.

Of course it is hypocrite , there is not a single good reason to spread FUD with no basis (just pure rationalization ) against canonical the way some KDE developers are doing it. They do not like baseless and nonsensical FUD against Qt nor KDE, me neither, i agree with you. But do not do the same against Canonical and Ubuntu, that would be hypocritical

Again, the keyword is asymmetry. What is Canonical able to do with Mir's code that companies and developers can't without paying for a license that will still not doubt restrict what they're able to do? Quite a bit more. Now ask the same question about Qt, and there's really not that much Digia can do that random developer/company can't. Then consider the fact that Qt is a just a toolkit anyway.

To paraphrase: Tight control over the foundation vs light control over a component. There is a difference.

[marciocr]

Again, the keyword is asymmetry. What is Canonical able to do with Mir's code that companies and developers can't without paying for a license that will still not doubt restrict what they're able to do? Quite a bit more. Now ask the same question about Qt, and there's really not that much Digia can do that random developer/company can't. Then consider the fact that Qt is a just a toolkit anyway.

To paraphrase: Tight control over the foundation vs light control over a component. There is a difference.

Like this?

http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.1/qtdoc/commerciallicense.html

[marciocr]

Again, the keyword is asymmetry. What is Canonical able to do with Mir's code that companies and developers can't without paying for a license that will still not doubt restrict what they're able to do? Quite a bit more. Now ask the same question about Qt, and there's really not that much Digia can do that random developer/company can't. Then consider the fact that Qt is a just a toolkit anyway.

To paraphrase: Tight control over the foundation vs light control over a component. There is a difference.

No.
Qt have a commercial licence, and the owner of that licence is Digia. And the Qt CLA give the permission to Digia to include the GPL code in the commercial version.
So it the same thing that the Canonical CLA authorizes. But with an aggravating. Digia already have a proprietary version of Qt, and Canonical MAYBE create a proprietary version of Mir

[hiryu]

No.
Qt have a commercial licence, and the owner of that licence is Digia. And the Qt CLA give the permission to Digia to include the GPL code in the commercial version.
So it the same thing that the Canonical CLA authorizes. But with an aggravating. Digia already have a proprietary version of Qt, and Canonical MAYBE create a proprietary version of Mir

Yes, they do authorize the same thing. Never claimed otherwise. It's the whole point of having a CLA to begin with. For both Digia and Canonical.

What I'm talking about is asymmetry. LGPL is a lot more flexible than GPLv3. It is what it is.

[Hamish Wilson]

All linux distributions are perfectly capable and able to distribute and tinkering that software for what ever reason, for instance to offer Unity too. A lot of people LIKE Unity. So if no other distribution wants to offer Unity, then the rest of the linux distribution community might be forcing X number of users to switch to ubuntu, which still offers all the software that other the distributions offer. And that is not really Canonical's fault.

Several distributions tried to support Unity, but decided against it after it became clear that it would be a huge effort to separate it from Ubuntu specific code paths, dependencies, and assumptions. This is exactly why people are concerned about Mir, and why cross-distribution standards are so important. Wayland is designed not be locked into a single vendor, while Canonical's projects are. So it is Canonical's fault, in so much as it was their design decisions that made doing like you suggested immensely impractical. Canonical has the right to do this, but it is you who are spreading FUD when you say it is purely up to the other distributions to go with either Unity or Mir. And for me personally, this is why I do not think it is the right thing to do.

Plus it does NOT offer all the software that the other distributions offer - for instance, systemd which Shuttleworth dreads so much, despite the fact that it is not tied to any one distribution like Unity or Mir.