Intel Reverts Plans, Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir

[RahulSundaram]

Not necessarily, their version could become reliant on proprietary plugins to function, they might change that much code in Gnome Shell that it would break stuff if it got ported back upstream and from a legal perspective they might get away with adding proprietary parts that dynamically link against Gnome Shell. While the FSF and the GPL state that dynamic linking means that the program using those GPL hooks would technically have to be GPL too, there's some ambiguity as to whether dynamic linking really creates a derived work or not.

If you think Intel would volunteer to be a case study to remove that ambiguity by trying to link proprietary code against a GPL'ed component and risk getting sued by FSF, you are just fooling yourself. Companies like Intel are enormously averse of licensing games like that and have enough experience with GPL'ed code and can be entirely relied upon never to do that. If they are shipping a modification of GNOME shell, it will remain GPL'ed. Whether they change interfaces is orthogonal to this.

[DDF420]

Oh ho. Where'd you learn such language? Do you kiss your mommy with that mouth, young man?

condescending as ever......nothing new

Anyway, no one is under any obligation to take Canonical's patches

No shit

to help them create a one-distro solution for one desktop environment

Stop the bullshit rhetoric.Unity works on other distros albeit not perfectly

Canonical themselves choose the path to go Mir, if they wanted collaboration and other people's help, there was already a very simple choice for them: use Wayland. That's the project chosen, by consensus, as the target for development as the next-generation Linux graphics system. Canonical is free to discard that option and make their own solution, but then it means that they can't just ask the rest of the community to do their work for them, if they want to go against the entire community and say "no, you guys are all wrong, we know better, things should be done our way" then they need to prove themselves and do all the work for it.

Blah blah the parrot is at it again
They are doing the work,stop making out like they never had any intention not doing so.

You can whine all day long about how people are evil for not doing Canonical's work for them, but in the end, if Canonical wanted collaboration, they should have gone with the project where people are already investing their work in, because that's the thing about free software, it's about choice. People get to choose where they put their work, and if Intel says they'd rather not put their work into maintaining patches for an unnecessary display solution that only benefits one company, instead of a display solution that benefits the entire community, that's their choice. Canonical also made their choice, now they have to live with it and put in the work.

Stop the bullshit rhetoric
This isn't about the work they have or haven't done.Or that upstream should or shouldn't accept the patch Its about the reason for a patches rejection. "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action" that goes against a lot of what Intel have portrayed with their opensource efforts/vison and the "their can be only one" leaves a rather bitter taste
I'm also still none the wiser who this "management" is ? Was that Intel OTC management ?

You can whine all day long about how people are evil for not doing Canonical's work for them, but in the end, if Canonical wanted collaboration, they should have gone with the project where people are already investing their work in, because that's the thing about free software, it's about choice. People get to choose where they put their work, and if Intel says they'd rather not put their work into maintaining patches for an unnecessary display solution that only benefits one company, instead of a display solution that benefits the entire community, that's their choice. Canonical also made their choice, now they have to live with it and put in the work.

If distros choose wayland or mir that's their choice. As with anything, Mir can only bring benefits to those that choose to use it.Canonical have made it very clear that their intention is to have Mir eventually work on all distros. So if a USER , god forbid, made a choice and wished to install Mir on their current distro they could and more importantly should be able to .Of course you are the kind of person that will then say its only useful for one distro due to all those out of tree patches.

[chrisb]

If you think Intel would volunteer to be a case study to remove that ambiguity by trying to link proprietary code against a GPL'ed component and risk getting sued by FSF, you are just fooling yourself. Companies like Intel are enormously averse of licensing games like that and have enough experience with GPL'ed code and can be entirely relied upon never to do that. If they are shipping a modification of GNOME shell, it will remain GPL'ed. Whether they change interfaces is orthogonal to this.

I think the doubt being expressed was aimed more at Samsung than Intel. They don't have the greatest record when it comes to GPL compliance and have been called out several times for either not releasing source, or releasing invalid source, sometimes code that didn't even compile. And afaik they still ship closed source kernel drivers even though Linus made it clear that he considers such drivers - developed primarily for the Linux kernel - to be a GPL violation.

[Vim_User]

Sure it does but it also says

Signed-off-by: Christopher James Halse Rogers <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <[email protected]>

From my understanding The sign-off-by certifies who wrote or is involved in the open-source patch.

So i am wrong about that? If not then why does Christopher appear on the signed-off ?

OK, I stand corrected on that.

If distros choose wayland or mir that's their choice. As with anything, Mir can only bring benefits to those that choose to use it.Canonical have made it very clear that their intention is to have Mir eventually work on all distros.

You are right, if a user wants to use Mir (which implies using Unity) then he has the right to do so. All he has to do to achieve that goal is to either use Ubuntu or port the complete Mir/Unity stack to his distro of choice. And there we are at the core of the problem: If you want to run Unity you have to use Mir, but for technical reasons it is impossible for any other DE/WM to support Mir. So any distro that wants to offer Unity to its users has also to port and maintain the complete Mir stack. Now tell me, which sane distro developer will choose to maintain the complete Mir stack just for one DE? You know that manpower is scarce for most distributions? That testing is nearly impossible as long as not a significant portion of the users of that specific distro are using Mir/Unity?
Of course Canonical wants to see Mir/Unity run on other distros, but it is almost impossible for exactly those reason.

[talvik]

Stop the bullshit rhetoric.Unity works on other distros albeit not perfectly

"not perfectly"? "barely manages to compile/run" is a more accurate description. To run Unity you to pull a bunch of Ubuntu patched only packages, which in turn will replace many default distro packages. This can't be said about any other DE.

But Unity on Mir is going to fix that. Try porting Unity and you have to pull Ubuntu patched: mesa, qt, gtk, gnome, x, video drivers, lightdm... So for example, if I somehow manage to get Unity/Mir on Fedora, it would replace so many packages that it wouldn't be Fedora anymore (lots of bugs would be invalid, many packages would conflict, other DEs would be removed)
It's becoming one big welded interdependent mess.

[intellivision]

I think the doubt being expressed was aimed more at Samsung than Intel. They don't have the greatest record when it comes to GPL compliance and have been called out several times for either not releasing source, or releasing invalid source, sometimes code that didn't even compile. And afaik they still ship closed source kernel drivers even though Linus made it clear that he considers such drivers - developed primarily for the Linux kernel - to be a GPL violation.

I'm waiting for the day when a kernel developer sues a company like Samsung for copyright violation for proprietary kernel drivers.
Pity that there's too much money invested in Linux for that to really succeed.

[RahulSundaram]

I think the doubt being expressed was aimed more at Samsung than Intel. They don't have the greatest record when it comes to GPL compliance and have been called out several times for either not releasing source, or releasing invalid source, sometimes code that didn't even compile. And afaik they still ship closed source kernel drivers even though Linus made it clear that he considers such drivers - developed primarily for the Linux kernel - to be a GPL violation.

Samsung has already been brought into compliance before http://sfconservancy.org/news/2013/a...exfat-samsung/ If you have further ongoing evidence of non compliance, feel free to post them publicly or better yet contact the software freedom conservacy. Several Linux kernel developers are participating in the enforcement process including but not limited to Matthew Garett and Greg KH.

[RahulSundaram]

I'm waiting for the day when a kernel developer sues a company like Samsung for copyright violation for proprietary kernel drivers. Pity that there's too much money invested in Linux for that to really succeed.

In almost all cases, companies can be brought into compliance without suing and that is more economical as well as the right thing to do. Suing companies should be always done as a last resort. In past cases, Samsung has complied http://sfconservancy.org/news/2013/a...exfat-samsung/

[dee.]

Because it won't be using vanilla Gnome Shell, but rather a version that has been changed by Intel and Samsung.
I personally don't know what incompatibilities they'll introduce, hopefully not enough to break plugins, but we'll see once their plan has been officially announced.

Actually, it rather seems they will be using vanilla Gnome shell, and "Tizen shell" is an extension, kind of like classic mode or the Cinnamon precursor MGSE.

The OS will support Gnome extensions, and you can assumedly even run any DE on it that you can on normal Linux distros. Tizen OS is aimed at "developers and gamers", it's basically just a Linux distro but has all the Tizen HTML5 frameworks added that allows you to run HTML5-based Tizen apps.

[dee.]

I think the doubt being expressed was aimed more at Samsung than Intel. They don't have the greatest record when it comes to GPL compliance and have been called out several times for either not releasing source, or releasing invalid source, sometimes code that didn't even compile. And afaik they still ship closed source kernel drivers even though Linus made it clear that he considers such drivers - developed primarily for the Linux kernel - to be a GPL violation.

Doesn't really matter, because Samsung doesn't really care about the desktop version of Tizen - they're in it purely for the mobile.