Luc Verhaegen Comments On Intel/Mir Politics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Luc Verhaegen Comments On Intel/Mir Politics

Luc Verhaegen, the former RadeonHD graphics driver developer at SUSE and now working on the Lima project for reverse-engineering ARM Mali graphics, has shared his thoughts on the recent developments surrounding Intel backing out their XMir driver support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ1ODE

[blackout23]

Stopped reading after the first two lines.

"So what if Canonical has decided to reinvent Wayland? Apart from the weird contribution agreement (which will only limit contributions), Mir is fully free software isn't it? Who are they hurting apart from their own resources and their own users? It's not that I am applauding Canonical for their decision, but I really don't see the massive problem here." Why is Canonical not allowed to do this?"

Am I missing something? Who has ever said that Canonical isn't allowed to build their own dispaly server? The point is that they'll have to do it on their own and can't force anyone to support them. If I come up with something why should I demand other people do do my homework?

This guy obviously has no overview of the situation.

[mdias]

We never have something that just works, we just go from broken state to broken state. And nobody learns from this, nobody apparently ever states "Hang on, isn't that pretty much the same story we heard 3 years ago?"

...It completely skews the ability of software to compete on a fair and equal grounds, and hurts us all as it is mostly applied by those who are not able to compete properly, or those who feel as if they shouldn't need to bother to compete properly. It tends to favour the least technically advanced and the least morally acceptable.

So first he's against most fragmentation, but then defends competition? This doesn't sound very right.

While I agree with most of his statements, he fails to see why Mir's existence is bad, and that's quiet obvious to me... It is again another solution that solves the exact same problem Wayland is trying to solve. This will divide efforts and waste everyone's time.

I don't really know much technical details about either Mir or Wayland, but the experts seem to defend that there's nothing that Mir solves that Wayland doesn't. In that sense, it's stupid to have both. And if Wayland was there before Mir, Mir's existence is stupid.

[mrugiero]

I wonder how is it that Luc notices Intel's course of action proves his point about the politics and the noise, but haven't realize Canonical's proves exactly the same. They made a display server out of politic decisions, put a half assed solution into a LTS release just to make noise, but suddenly Intel is the only one letting politics and noise making lead their decisions. Oh, well...

[libv]

I wonder how is it that Luc notices Intel's course of action proves his point about the politics and the noise, but haven't realize Canonical's proves exactly the same. They made a display server out of politic decisions, put a half assed solution into a LTS release just to make noise, but suddenly Intel is the only one letting politics and noise making lead their decisions. Oh, well...

You're almost there with your logic. My trouble with this intel move is that this is intel stooping down to canonical levels, or even lower.

[TheOne]

excellent article, I almost 100% agree with Luc , but at the end this thread will be filled with fanboys and hatred.

[mark45]

You're almost there with your logic. My trouble with this intel move is that this is intel stooping down to canonical levels, or even lower.

No it's not, unless you're a drama queen type. It's stupid for Intel to support a product of a different company which directly competes with its own product (Wayland devs are paid mostly by Intel/Red Hat). Folks, this is not socialism where anyone has to be nice to the point of supporting its own competition, it's about winning and making money, get real.

This is what every open source company does, on the surface they pretend they're nice and "share" everything they can with everybody (call it neo-socialism or whatever) but in reality every open or non-open source company only cares about growing profits, market expansion and crushing the competition. There was never a time "when companies were good".

[mrugiero]

You're almost there with your logic. My trouble with this intel move is that this is intel stooping down to canonical levels, or even lower.

Yes, I commented before reaching half of the article, my bad on that. However, you stopped to make an article about that, while I don't recall you mentioned Canonical as an example in the previous article, while you did mention Intel proves your point now. Both of them proved your point.

Also, as I discussed in the original thread about Intel reverting the patch, even though it's ugly that the management gets to choose about it, they are paying those devs, and they don't want them to maintain that support (even if the patch is trivial) on their money. If the ones maintaining it will be from Canonical, then it's probably easier for them to just skip all of the upstream revisions and just get it out of tree, so I think Chris shouldn't have done the patch in the first place, until it stops being a one distro solution, since until then it makes more sense in downstream. Of course, one could argue he did it in his free time, but I think if that's so, he should state it, so every discussion about Intel here will be over with the "they rejected a free patch just because of politics" statement.

[Pajn]

but at the end this thread will be filled with fanboys and hatred.

The whole Wayland vs. Mir is just fanboys and hatred.
People who care about the technology doesn't rely care.
No one gets hurt by having a competition if the competition
plays by the rules with Intel now didn't.

I must agree on a great post! Maybe someone will actually
read it.
The ones who stops reading after just two lines by the sole
reason that you haven?t bashed Mir yet isn't very valuable
to the community anyway.

[mrugiero]

No it's not, unless you're a drama queen type. It's stupid for Intel to support a product of a different company which directly competes with its own product (Wayland devs are paid mostly by Intel/Red Hat). Folks, this is not socialism where anyone has to be nice to the point of supporting its own competition, it's about winning and making money, get real.

This is what every open source company does, on the surface they pretend they're nice and "share" everything they can with everybody (call it neo-socialism or whatever) but in reality every open or non-open source company only cares about growing profits, market expansion and crushing the competition. There was never a time "when companies were good".

Yes, but they could be benefited for maintaining support (even though, it's their call to do so or not) because they sell hardware that gets better supported in more platforms with this patch.