Canonical's Mir Project Retracts Wayland Criticism

If you are now to look at Ubuntu's Mir specification page for their new display server, you will see that their open criticism of Wayland/Weston has disappeared.

When Canonical announced their X.Org Server replacement not based on Wayland yesterday, it surprised many end-users and developers alike. In their initial specification page, they criticized Wayland by saying that they couldn't base their solution on Wayland because it "suffers from multiple problems." Among the problems they mentioned were the input event handling partly recreates X semantics, the shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged, and that "it didn't find out requirements."

Kristian Høgsberg, the founder of the five-year-old Wayland project was quick to say Canonical's claims are unfounded and his negativity was also met by other upstream X.Org / Wayland developers. These upstream developers outright don't agree with Canonical's assessment of Wayland but there's more of a feeling that Mark Shuttleworth's company was just suffering from "Not Invented Here" syndrome, again.

There was a colorful IRC discussion on the Wayland IRC channel yesterday where one of the Mir developers admitted to not knowing a lot about Wayland's input handling and other interesting statements. Kristian in that exchange called out Canonical "don't piss on wayland in the process."

Now this morning, Thomas Voß, one of the Canonical Mir developers has revised the Wiki page.

The Mir specification removed the Wayland criticism and added that Wayland's input event handling has indeed been improved compared to X, plus added some more jargon, and ultimately concluded with: "However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but due to our different requirements we decided to go for the following architecture [with regard] to protocol-integration."