Shuttleworth Challenged Over Mir Comments

[MartinN]

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we’ll get it done, and it will be amazing.

I can tell you what the agenda of the Mir team is: speed, quality, reliability, efficiency

Mark, once it was established that Mir holds no technical advantage over Wayland - after you failed to fulfill on your public Wayland promise, I could only deduce that the very reason for Mir's existence is purely political/ego-driven.

It really hurts when someone as prominent as yourself makes promises and a couple of years later breaks them. It hurts when division of labor is created by people with deeper pockets such as yourself, despite working toward a common goal all the while on the backs of others. The analogies between upstart/systemd only mildly apply here, most of those things are backend things, invisible to the end user. The gravity of both of these predicaments is radically different - the future of the Linux desktop is being created here. I don't remember nearly as much uproar over systemd/upstart as this.

This is why people are pissed off, not because you want to create your Mir display server, which you're free to do. They feel ripped off and cheated. And you never to this day said, "I'm sorry I fucked up". You don't even have to clean up the mess you made. Wayland will do that for you. But the least you could have done is issue a public apology for being a turncoat.

The entire reason you still can't get off it about Wayland and all this lame name calling is because you just can't admit you screwed the pooch just this once. It's all about you, yourself and Mark here, and heaven's forbid if you just said "I'm sorry" if for nothing else, to just calm the bad spirits on here and elsewhere (i.e. G+). You too will feel better about yourself once you've done it as you will be able to quit the constant jabbing ("Wayland is a repeat of X-Windows mistakes", and this latest "Wayland is the Tea-party"), save face and focus 100% on finishing Mir instead of bashing Wayland.

Most people here could care less if Mir becomes the most used, most stellar piece of software for the next 2 decades on the Linux, pardon, Ubuntu desktop..... They do however care to have you be an authentic human being, and do what's right...

[theghost]

It really hurts when someone as prominent as yourself makes promises and a couple of years later breaks them. It hurts when division of labor is created by people with deeper pockets such as yourself, despite working toward a common goal all the while on the backs of others. The analogies between upstart/systemd only mildly apply here, most of those things are backend things, invisible to the end user. The gravity of both of these predicaments is radically different - the future of the Linux desktop is being created here. I don't remember nearly as much uproar over systemd/upstart as this.

This is why people are pissed off, not because you want to create your Mir display server, which you're free to do. They feel ripped off and cheated. And you never to this day said, "I'm sorry I fucked up". You don't even have to clean up the mess you made. Wayland will do that for you. But the least you could have done is issue a public apology for being a turncoat.

Come on, "people are angry because something was promised years ago"...
And not every bold statement is directed towards KDE. KDE is not the center of the OSS universe (anymore). Even if they still think they are. In the past years they lost a lot of creditibility with their KDE3 / 4 transition.

A true project would stfu and get their own stuff together instead of whining the whole day that someone promised sth. or someone called someone the "tea party". It would be the best to open up a a huge Free Software Kindergarten to put all OSS divas out there. Then they can do the mud slinging there...

[dee.]

A true project would stfu and get their own stuff together instead of whining the whole day that someone promised sth.

Right, so why isn't Canonical doing that? Why does the Glorious Leader of Canonical need to sling mud at others, throw around FUD and paranoid accusations instead of getting their own stuff together?

Mark is now claiming that Wayland is made as an attempt to "prevent Canonical from succeeding". There's this huge persecution complex going on with some Canonical people, this attitude that if you don't like what they do then you're a bully or an elitist wanting Linux to be difficult to use, or whatever fallacious strawman argument Mark comes up with next. Why don't they just focus on doing their thing, instead of playing these silly word games and spreading lies?

[makomk]

And KDE could need more love too, it has some real flaws since years.

Thankfully, Wayland has allowed them to apply the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers development methodology to KDE development - rather than fixing bugs, they can just say it's probably X's fault so it's not worth the effort. I saw this happen with an obnoxious kwin bug that turned out to have a trivial one-line fix; the main developer refused to even investigate the bug report citing this argument. Then when Wayland finally does come out they can tell anyone that complains about bugs that they should just use X and older KDE versions until they're polished out (though of course, those older versions will also be in an awful state because the developers spent all their time on shiny new stuff).

Meanwhile, plasma-desktop segfaults every half hour and KDE is a nightmare to use.

[Temar]

I could only deduce that the very reason for Mir's existence is purely political/ego-driven.

I think it was mostly a business decision. At the beginning, they probably thought that there were technical reasons, too. But still, it was most likely a business decision.

The reasons are simple:

1) Working _with_ the community on a project is slow and tedious. There are too many egos involved which lead to endless discussions. Also the main focus of a community project is not speed of development but a clean architecture. That's why Google simply forked the Linux kernel for Android, instead of sending in patches. They knew they had to take some shortcuts and didn't want to waste time in endless discussions. Sure, Ubuntu could have forked Wayland, like Google did with the kernel but the shitstorm would have been the same. Also, at that time, they probably still thought that Wayland had some technical problems.

2) Having full control over a project is a big business advantage, once you have a running architecture.

[Vim_User]

Meanwhile, plasma-desktop segfaults every half hour and KDE is a nightmare to use.

And I guess you invested the time to look if that is a general KDE thing and does not only happen on your distro and have eliminated all other things so that it must be a KDE bug and after doing that have reported the bug. Or am I wrong here?

[RushPL]

plasma-desktop is terribly unstable. I tend to have several days long uptimes and while it does not crash every half an hour it is not stable by means. Try plugging new monitors every now and then.. plasma will get confused trying to fit its UI very quickly and while being confused it tends to crash. Sometimes KRunner just hangs and is not accessible. All very annoying.

[makomk]

And I guess you invested the time to look if that is a general KDE thing and does not only happen on your distro and have eliminated all other things so that it must be a KDE bug and after doing that have reported the bug. Or am I wrong here?

I invested the (thankfully relatively minimal) time required to get a clean backtrace and discovered that quite a number of people had already reported the same crash across multiple distros and KDE versions, and that the KDE developers were aware of the problem but had no idea what was causing it or when it would be fixed except that it was probably a bug of some kind in one particular part of Qt that Plasma relies on. This was some time ago though, so I guess I should check again in the off-chance there are multiple bugs that are causing Plasma to repeatedly crash for me.

[hiryu]

CLA

Mir is CLA, Qt is CLA? Same exact thing, right? Therefore Aaron is a hypocrite, right?

Not exactly.

Qt has that open source agreement. Some say it doesn't have any teeth. It seems people who actually know what they're talking about (ie, lawyers) feel that the agreement is valid.

Well okay. For the sake or argument, lets assume the agreement has absolutely no teeth. That is to say, if Apple bought Digia tomorrow, they could entirely lockup Qt without releasing Qt under a BSD style license.

That leaves us with the real difference. Qt is LGPL2.1 where as Mir is GPLv3. There's a *world* of fucking difference between those licenses. There's a reason we're seeing a lot of platforms shift away from gcc since it migrated to the GPLv3. It isn't some stupid BSD ideology either as the BSD's would have stayed with a GPLv2 licensed gcc (this is why FreeBSD and OpenBSD are using gcc 4.2, the last GPLv2 licensed gcc, interestingly, NetBSD seems to be using newer gcc releases).

Even if you think the GPLv3 is the greatest license in the world (I don't really take issue with the GPLv3, but I can understand why some companies are adverse to it), the main argument against CLA's is asymmetry. What asymmetries do we see with Qt? You can link closed source applications against Qt, but you can't statically link them without a license. The source to any changes to Qt itself must also be made available, but closed applications can remain closed. These really aren't a big deal.

So maybe those small asymmetries are still too much for you and Aaron is still a hypocrite. There's another important point. Qt is a just a toolkit, Mir is a display server. In X, if you don't like Qt, use GTK. You can even run GTK and Qt apps side by side with no penalty other than a small increase in memory footprint. Your application will still run on any desktop in X as well. A display server is a much more foundational part of the stack. Wayland and Mir are much more mutually exclusive. We'll see some toolkits that will support both transparently, but we'll see how this approach works out. I don't think it's going to go well since most see Mir for what it is and don't want to support it.

Most technical minded and/or experienced linux people immediately saw Mir for what it was. Mir is clearly power grab. If Mir had been released under the MIT license like Wayland, I think we'd be seeing _far_ less hate. Instead, Mir is under the GPLv3 with a CLA. No way you cut it, the MIT license is far more permissive than the GPLv3. If Mir wins, we've given far too much control of a fundamental part of the stack to a single entity. This would be bad in general, but it's even worse when you realize there's no technical basis for Mir over Wayland.

I'm busy so I may not be able to respond, and I definitely won't respond to trolls.

[Rallos Zek]

Mir is CLA, Qt is CLA? Same exact thing, right? Therefore Aaron is a hypocrite, right?

Not exactly.

Qt has that open source agreement. Some say it doesn't have any teeth. It seems people who actually know what they're talking about (ie, lawyers) feel that the agreement is valid.

Well okay. For the sake or argument, lets assume the agreement has absolutely no teeth. That is to say, if Apple bought Digia tomorrow, they could entirely lockup Qt without releasing Qt under a BSD style license.

That leaves us with the real difference. Qt is LGPL2.1 where as Mir is GPLv3. There's a *world* of fucking difference between those licenses. There's a reason we're seeing a lot of platforms shift away from gcc since it migrated to the GPLv3. It isn't some stupid BSD ideology either as the BSD's would have stayed with a GPLv2 licensed gcc (this is why FreeBSD and OpenBSD are using gcc 4.2, the last GPLv2 licensed gcc, interestingly, NetBSD seems to be using newer gcc releases).

Even if you think the GPLv3 is the greatest license in the world (I don't really take issue with the GPLv3, but I can understand why some companies are adverse to it), the main argument against CLA's is asymmetry. What asymmetries do we see with Qt? You can link closed source applications against Qt, but you can't statically link them without a license. The source to any changes to Qt itself must also be made available, but closed applications can remain closed. These really aren't a big deal.

So maybe those small asymmetries are still too much for you and Aaron is still a hypocrite. There's another important point. Qt is a just a toolkit, Mir is a display server. In X, if you don't like Qt, use GTK. You can even run GTK and Qt apps side by side with no penalty other than a small increase in memory footprint. Your application will still run on any desktop in X as well. A display server is a much more foundational part of the stack. Wayland and Mir are much more mutually exclusive. We'll see some toolkits that will support both transparently, but we'll see how this approach works out. I don't think it's going to go well since most see Mir for what it is and don't want to support it.

Most technical minded and/or experienced linux people immediately saw Mir for what it was. Mir is clearly power grab. If Mir had been released under the MIT license like Wayland, I think we'd be seeing _far_ less hate. Instead, Mir is under the GPLv3 with a CLA. No way you cut it, the MIT license is far more permissive than the GPLv3. If Mir wins, we've given far too much control of a fundamental part of the stack to a single entity. This would be bad in general, but it's even worse when you realize there's no technical basis for Mir over Wayland.

I'm busy so I may not be able to respond, and I definitely won't respond to trolls.

Your post is one long dibble of hypocrisy and BS, you sir are the biggest hypocrite of the week and a anti-Canonical troll.