Canonical Loses Work From Top Compiz Contributor

Following a tough week for Canonical with controversies surrounding the Mir Display Server and uncertainties about whether Ubuntu 13.04 would be released or turned into a rolling release model, Sam Spilsbury one of the lead Compiz developers and former Canonical employees, had some harsh words for the Ubuntu backer.

Spilsbury severed ties with Canonical a few months back but was still dabbling with the Compiz manager, for which he's one of the top contributors.

In response to a blog post, Sam Spilsbury commented:

What’s really disappointed me is the level of uncertainty the community as a whole is currently facing. For example, the entire story around what actually happens to 13.04 at the moment has been incredibly vague and opaque, and quite recently I was told that I was basically going to throw away 4 months of hard work because Ubuntu wasn’t going to take my patches because they don’t want to take community patches on compiz anymore. So I’ve just stopped working on compiz because I don’t even know how things are going to be handled at canonical. Which is a shame, because my patches vastly improve performance on nvidia hardware, are fully tested, developed using TDD, user tested, peer reviewed, what more could you ask for?

Ubuntu for me is now a waste of time, and I’m just focusing on my study instead. Canonical lost me as an employee by pulling these stunts on me, and now they’ve lost me as a maintainer of their legacy stack too.

So Canonical isn't accepting community patches anymore for Compiz and so they've lost Spilsbury's support now, who had been working on significant performance improvements.

Here's also provided some additional commentary on the matter via his blog with:

- Delivering Free Software to the Masses

- The ACTUAL Mir and Wayland Comparison

- Mir Display Server

With Canonical being the only backer in recent years of Compiz, and the Canonical developers now working on Mir, it looks like Compiz will die off before ever seeing its v1.0 release.