Luc Verhaegen Comments On Intel/Mir Politics

[mdias]

TBH, I thought that Intel was in the business of selling hardware, and that therefor providing good driver support should be their prime concern. Reinventing the X server, or fighting battles over such things, should be less of important. With this move intel seems to have forgotten about this niggle.

While your logic makes sense, I think you're overdoing it.. Maybe Intel is just worried about future maintenance burden of something they don't understand the reason to exist.

Given Intel's history with open source, I'm inclined (though certainly with eyes opened) to believe there's a valid reason behind droping XMir support until proven otherwise.

[Pajn]

I'm really tired of this kind of comments. I'm giving free testing to Canonical's Mir, so please stop calling me a hater (and don't deny you did, because you clearly generalized to everyone who tries to make sense out of it). The fact is I care about the technology, and that's why I don't bitch about all of the other NIH syndromes around open source (including the whole systemd/upstart situation), because most actually bring some differences. This time, it introduces more severe fragmentation (I'm aware it's partially alleviated by toolkits), and I'm still waiting to see any reason for it. Also, I'm completely against running DEs on XMir because I care about the technology, and specifically I care about friends who will be using this technology. That's also why I test it whenever I can. Luckily, my flavor of choice won't use it in 13.10.

No having Mir and Wayland doesn't introduces severe fragmentation. Neither Mir
nor Wayland have any built in toolkit. All renderings are done to buffers and buffers
alone. And because of that no software like xclock or xcalc will be written for any
of the as that simply isn't possible. Toolkit is what will be used and if a toolkit
supports both your app bill support both.

And I don't know what running a DE in XMir have to do whit any of this. If you
think it's pointless then god don't do it, nobody cares.

[mrugiero]

You need to do more than writing the patch. You need tp prove you will be there for the entire life time to maintain it. If not you can't do that it will become Intel's burden. They have solid reasons to back out of this. Canonical can pick up the patch if they like such non-CLA code.

Yes, but that's for getting accepted. If it got accepted, it means the maintainer was convinced enough.
Also, I mentioned several times already that they can pick up the patch, and that I do think it belongs to downstream. This doesn't change the fact management choose politics over technical reasons. On the technical side, I will always trust more the maintainer than the manager, and I do that because the maintainer is usually someone trained to pay attention this technical details, while management is trained to evaluate more on the costs/benefits side.

TBH, I thought that Intel was in the business of selling hardware, and that therefor providing good driver support should be their prime concern. Reinventing the X server, or fighting battles over such things, should be less of important. With this move intel seems to have forgotten about this niggle.

Yes, but you are wrong in one part of your article: the fact Ubuntu has a sizable portion of the desktop Linux doesn't change the fact it's under 4% of the market share, and I'm actually giving an exaggerated big number just to be sure, so it's probably not a sizable portion of their client base on the desktop. They probably think their investment on Wayland outweighs what they gain from selling computers to Ubuntu users, and probably expect either the mobile or the enterprise users to make more money for them, and probably think this will happen with Wayland, not with Mir.

[Ramiliez]

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".

+1 to this especially the second part

[libv]

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.

TBH, I thought that Intel was in the business of selling hardware, and that therefor providing good driver support should be their prime concern. Reinventing the X server, or fighting battles over such things, should be less of important. With this move intel seems to have forgotten about this niggle.

[mrugiero]

What specific rules have Intel broken?

They showed a policy they never seemed to have (management reverting a patch) just because it helped a specific group. I don't think that's very community friendly, even when the ones taking profit of it are Canonical. Picture this situation: you are an independent developer, you take the time to design a patch to do something, you pass through all of the process of getting your patch merged, and then some anonymous individual decides to revert it because they do not condone the actions of a group who is benefitted by your patch. I don't think that's OK. If it got accepted, it means there was no technical reason to reject it.

[mrugiero]

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'm really tired of this kind of comments. I'm giving free testing to Canonical's Mir, so please stop calling me a hater (and don't deny you did, because you clearly generalized to everyone who tries to make sense out of it). The fact is I care about the technology, and that's why I don't bitch about all of the other NIH syndromes around open source (including the whole systemd/upstart situation), because most actually bring some differences. This time, it introduces more severe fragmentation (I'm aware it's partially alleviated by toolkits), and I'm still waiting to see any reason for it. Also, I'm completely against running DEs on XMir because I care about the technology, and specifically I care about friends who will be using this technology. That's also why I test it whenever I can. Luckily, my flavor of choice won't use it in 13.10.

[TheBlackCat]

if the competition
plays by the rules with Intel now didn't.

What specific rules have Intel broken?

[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.

[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.