More Mir Talking Points Come Out Of Canonical

[brent]

What's the specific problem with Canonical's CLA? The GNU copyright assignment is similar and nobody seems to give a shit. IMHO, the GNU is no more trustworthy than Canonical. A permissive license would have been a better choice for Mir, though, especially as they want to support GPU vendors which usually don't like GPL family licenses.

That said, explicit effort to support common graphics stacks, open source and closed source, seems to be the most important difference between Mir and Wayland. As far as I know, Wayland/Weston developers have said (or at least implied) they don't particularly care about the blobs and won't collaborate with GPU vendors or go out of their way to make blob support happen. But no matter how much some people wish for an open source graphics world, the blobs are here to stay for some time.

[F i L]

Part of that is on Google+. He accused me of being secretly funded by Intel (untrue) to make a secret fork of Wayland (untrue) solely to harm Mir (even if it existed, obviously untrue). He's basing this on me saying that I had implemented server-side buffer allocation on a proprietary EGL implementation, but couldn't release the patches - which was pretty obvious, since it's a proprietary stack. I then went on to describe exactly what you'd need to do to implement this somewhere else, but Mark still believes - despite the fact that I'm neither working on Wayland at all, nor am doing this for Intel - that me doing this is an Intel-funded conspiracy to harm Mir.

So I wouldn't listen to a word he says, really.

lol, thanks for the clarification on that. I was wondering what he was talking about with Wayland "not being as openly developed" as some would think.

That said, hopefully his claimed dealings with Nvidia and AMD will actually help those companies to create DS agnostic drivers (if that's even possible) which will only help propel Wayland future ahead. That's a big IF though...

[TemplarGR]

But no matter how much some people wish for an open source graphics world, the blobs are here to stay for some time.

Probably less time than you think... Intel is on the vast majority of systems and they are FOSS. AMD's hardware will eventually become far less dependent on software optimisations that it is now, so the FOSS drivers will catch up. Nvidia will become irelevant as a company and will join the likes of Matrox, having a niche for CUDA etc and nothing more... If you wonder why Nvidia is doomed, then you don't follow the hardware evolutions so closely... There is no future for discrete gpu's anymore. Maybe some years left, but they will disappear like discrete FPUs disappeared years ago...

[e8hffff]

Schedule and Adoption problems?...You do realize Mir is far behind Wayland at this point don't you?...Also, what "new opportunities" are you talking about?

'adoption' as in going into service/production as the main DS.

'schedule' as in replacing other display servers and obtaining advocacy from hardware makers.

Mir is walking on a path already made, like Wayland did on X11. Mir will add to the experience and facilities, so I think they will make headway.

The opportunity is now here for Wayland team to rally with Mir to make a damn brilliant engine. Both teams have something to gain from this scenario. With success comes rewards and notoriety.

[xeekei]

I suggest using Ubuntu if you don't want to be left out. New stuff always comes first to Ubuntu since it's the most popular for now. So Steam and other goodies work on Ubuntu but not on other distros. It has nothing to do with evilness or any conspiracy, it's just natural to target the most popular first.

Or you make your application distro-agnostic. Which won't be as easy now when Canonical decided to stab the community they've been using in the back.

[TemplarGR]

I suggest using Ubuntu if you don't want to be left out. New stuff always comes first to Ubuntu since it's the most popular for now. So Steam and other goodies work on Ubuntu but not on other distros. It has nothing to do with evilness or any conspiracy, it's just natural to target the most popular first.

Steam works just fine on my Arch system... What are the other goodies you mention? Unity? Don't make us laugh Canonical fanboi... BTW, i am using Ubuntuone on my Archlinux too, thanx for the free online storage...

[duby229]

Steam works just fine on my Arch system... What are the other goodies you mention? Unity? Don't make us laugh Canonical fanboi... BTW, i am using Ubuntuone on my Archlinux too, thanx for the free online storage...

It also works just fine on gentoo with oss radeon drivers. Of course I havent tried many games yet. But works fine none the less. Hell even the windows steam client works great. all games I've tried render perfectly, just that directx games are too slow to be playable.

[F i L]

I suggest using Ubuntu if you don't want to be left out. New stuff always comes first to Ubuntu since it's the most popular for now. So Steam and other goodies work on Ubuntu but not on other distros. It has nothing to do with evilness or any conspiracy, it's just natural to target the most popular first.

That sounds like a great argument... to use Windows.

Seriously i don't know how many times I need to repeat this. If Canonical can't "play nice" with others in the open community, they don't deserve the same level of respect as other community projects. I'm not saying they're all bad or anything like that, I'm saying judge each of there action for it's merits, not "well Canonical did something really dumb and potentially destructive for no reason, but it's okay cause we have to follow what they do cause they're the 'big kid on the block'". I mean, if that's your attitude, why even use open-source software in the first place?

[RahulSundaram]

What's the specific problem with Canonical's CLA? The GNU copyright assignment is similar and nobody seems to give a shit

Copyright license agreements are generally an additional hassle and dither casual contributions. If you are working for another company, you will have to get a sign off from the legal department. This applies to GNU agreement as well and people do raise concerns about it from time to time (refer to https://lwn.net/Articles/529522/ for an example) but most major IT companies already have a working relationship with GPL'ed software and understand the GNU agreement . FSF being a non-profit provides a neutral ground. Commercial organizations however are not at the same positon as GNU because of the nature of the agreement is one sided

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright

Now, Canonical recently changed their agreement so that you don't have to assign copyright but give them a very broad license but the end result is that GPL doesn't apply to them and they retain the ability to take your contributions and relicense them under a proprietary license.

[aironeous]

Being relatively new to linux (less than a year) I think it's funny that it seems any opinion someone puts on here is strongly countered by someone else saying how they are totally wrong.
Let me check something.

Blueberries are awesome.