Jolla Brings Wayland Atop Android GPU Drivers

[maksml]

Jolla looks good

Its good to see companies embracing Wayland.
I've been fond of Jolla since the beginning.
This just makes me more fond of them.

[argeep]

Using Wayland with Android drivers is not new. Collabora ported Wayland to Android months ago: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.de/2012/09...o-404-and.html
This here is obviously a step further in that Wayland runs not only on an Android system but now on a glibc system with libhybris but Android drivers are used in both cases (and this Jolla works probably builds on the Collabora work).

Indeed. Carsten gives credit in his blog for this...

...

This is the entry point used to implement Wayland on top of Android GPU drivers on glibc based systems. Some fantastic work in this area has already been done by Pekka Paalanen (pq) as part of his work for Collabora Ltd. (Telepathy, GStreamer, WebKit, X11 experts) which proved that this is possible. Parts of the solution I will publish is based on their work - their work was groundbreaking in this field and made all this possible.

...

[Teho]

Reduce pressure on creating free drivers or on open the hardware seems a bad idea.

I think effect might actually be positive in that area. First of all this there's multiple problems with the closed source drivers on ARM space, one of the more important ones being that they usually work for only couple of kernel releases. That doesn't really fit the fast moving Linux developement model so open drivers is needed for that. But also I think it might be more interesting to develop these drivers when you already have a proper GNU/Linux stack running on top of it. Also the closed source drivers for AMD and NVIDIA haven't really stopped the open source driver developement for their cards. These Ubuntu Touch / Sailfish / Firefox OS projects are so insignificant currently that they hardly create any "pressure" anyway. They might actually do if they first got out of the door but that then again is very difficult without having good support for closed source drivers.

Your argument really holds no water here.

There might be some configurations of Tizen (or previously MeeGo) that allows/allowed L/GPLv3; GPLv3 code was removed from MeeGo TV and it was a no-go for IVI systems as well. Yocto has "non-GPLv3" option. One can only wonder why Apple wanted to avoid GPLv3 to the point of writing alternative for Samba (and GCC?). Projects like FreeBSD are also "fine" with L/GPLv2 but GPLv3 just goes too far. Tizen coreutils seems to be based on the pre-GPLv3 release of GNU coreutils too.

[Hermit]

I thought Carsten's own words were quite interesting:

Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.

That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.

So basically everything Mir has achieved -- Androit driver integration, based on Carsten's libhybris intended to support Wayland on Sailfish. Mesa integration, based on Kristian's EGL/GBM work intended for Wayland. XMir, straight port from XWayland, not to mention the general architecture of Mir heavily influenced by Wayland.

Now, I'm not calling them leechers or parasites or any other names. This is the nature of open source software. You are allowed, sometimes even encouraged to build upon the work of others. But give credit where it's due. Carsten did say they are being quite cooperative now, participating in discussions and submitting patches upstream. This is the way it should have been from the beginning.

[dee.]

You should use your energie for hitting closed drivers instead of hitting canonical.

Canonical has done nothing to get rid of closed drivers.

[dibal]

Does that surprise you...? I havent used this phrase yet because i didn't agree with it then, but quite honestly... Canonical is the Apple of the OSS world. Happy I havent loaded *Buntu in a longtime on any computers haha

You should use your energie for hitting closed drivers instead of hitting canonical.

[dibal]

Getting unified Android/Linux/ChromeOS drivers would be ideal, whoever manages to bring us that. It should've been Google's project from day one of Android, but I guess it wasn't their priority, which is too bad because that has led to some of the biggest fragmentation issues of Android.

But only if the drivers were not closed. If closed drivers goes mainstream in linux, you can also use windows.

[dibal]

Reduce pressure on creating free drivers or on open the hardware seems a bad idea.

[Ericg]

If that was the case, Canonical was a driving force behind WebKit, developed Clang and contributed it to LLVM, maintained CUPS, managed X.org releases, invented libdispatch, developed Bonjour, ect. and did all that without any CLA crap.

More in the sense of... the take credit for others work. Not in a way "Oh we're distributing it" way but a "They coded it. We took it. Called it our own, claimed development of it because most people wont check the license file that marks us as liars."

[Awesomeness]

This means: the only legitimate reason to support Mir has disappeared overnight.

Using Wayland with Android drivers is not new. Collabora ported Wayland to Android months ago: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.de/2012/09...o-404-and.html
This here is obviously a step further in that Wayland runs not only on an Android system but now on a glibc system with libhybris but Android drivers are used in both cases (and this Jolla works probably builds on the Collabora work).

On several occasions one or two Mir main developers stated they didn't participate in the decision to create Mir. And Mir is developed under CLA and GPLv3(fact: a lot of companies avoid GPLv3 in their products or simply ban it).

<tinfoil> I bet the reasons aren't technical at all. They want control and a restrictive license, so they can sell proprietary licenses to manufacturers. Google sells services and Canonical sells proprietary license to GLPv3 code. </tinfoil>

What's ?tinfoil? about that? It's exactly the same business model Trolltech used for Qt, Oracle uses for MySQL, etc.

Canonical is the Apple of the OSS world.

If that was the case, Canonical was a driving force behind WebKit, developed Clang and contributed it to LLVM, maintained CUPS, managed X.org releases, invented libdispatch, developed Bonjour, ect. and did all that without any CLA crap.