Mir/Ubuntu Developer Talks Up Mir Outside Of Unity 8

[Steffo]

Because they thought they could make something better than Wayland, and also faster. (to give a sense of scale, Wayland is developed by everyone, Mir only by Canonical)

And this is generally the same reason they also made Bazaar, Upstart, and pretty much anything else that crashed and burned in the past.

Not good reasoning, because Bazaar is (one month) older than git, upstart is older than systemd.

[MadCatX]

Come on Canonical, do everybody including yourselves a favor a give it up already. Wayland has beaten you to the market on handhelds with Sailfish, now you have lost on the desktop since Fedora 25 release, there are very few software projects besides your own that support Mir (or are at least planning to). The last thing that desktop Linux needs is yet another level of fragmentation which has a great potential to break things. Let's face it - abstracting away display system specifics is hard, Qt devs would tell you - and you do not have the manpower to maintain Mir support all by yourselves on every level of the display stack that needs to have some Mir-specific code.

[starshipeleven]

Not good reasoning, because Bazaar is (one month) older than git, upstart is older than systemd.

I'm talking of the fact that they prefer to run alone in the open source world where the whole point is getting everyone else to contribute, not that they always came later than others.
Both Bazaar and Upstart were examples of this, same as Mir, the fact they were older or newer than what actually won and became de-facto default does not change my point.

[oliver+]

To be fair, Wayland is just a protocol. If Canonical decided to use the Wayland protocol, they would still have to write their Wayland display server from the ground up just like Gnome KDE et al have been doing. By not adhering to the protocol, there is an increase in flexibility. If that flexibility has or ever will materialize into any tangible benefit remains to be seen...

thanks for that post.

[MartinN]

No one outside canonical really knows.

I'd wager no one within Canonical except Shuttleworth knows. And even at that, I bet he's still unsure he made the right choice. By now, it's clear to us - if not him - he bet on the wrong horse. Jobs is dead, long live Jobs - is probably Shittleworth's favorite mantra by now.

The reasons they listed ending up being technically incorrect, and no more legitimate reasons have been provided other than that they want control.

Yet we have Linux, which no single entity controls outright.... and is bigger than any other OS on the Internet or in the enterprise (ok, some of us still use AIX, but that's like..almost dead ). Heh... This - and this alone - is the only reason for Mir's existence. Every other technical reason they produced has been smashed to smithereens over and over and over.... on this and other forums and mailing lists.

What I suspect happened is that someone inside of Canonical told management that Wayland was trying to do to much and satisfy too many different needs and that this was slowing it down. If Canonical just created something simple for their own needs, they could get it done much faster. The problem is no one at Canonical knew enough about display servers to understand how complicated they really are (the Dunning–Kruger effect).

So management gave the group some time (probably six months or so judging by the timeline) to get something usable. That is why they kept it a secret, they didn't know whether it would actually pan out. After those six months, the developers had a basic working display server. They thought this was the hard part, and the rest was just finishing touches. So they made the announcement, and set a timeline based on this (lack of) understanding. But then, as they started trying to implement these "finishing touches", they ran into problem after problem. Design decisions in Wayland that they thought were wasting time ended up being important for reasons Canonical didn't have the expertise to recognize. Things that thought would be easy to implement ended up being harder than the display server itself, which Wayland had factored into their timelines but Canonical hadn't.

So months turned into years, and the simpler, more focused alternative to Wayland ended up adopting more and more of Wayland's design. Things Canonical thought they would implement themselves ended up having to be borrowed from Wayland. They got bit by the Ninety-nine rule, where the "last little bit" of the development ends up taking more time than the "main part" of the project.

The above passage nicely outlines the cost of Canonical's/Shittleworth's hubris.

However, by the point this became clear they had put too much resources into Mir. The Sunk-cost fallacy came into play. Add to that the fact that they had burnt too many bridges with their comments early in the Mir development and the fact that Mir had become a matter of pride, and changing course became impossible.

No no.. it's possible. They can do a rim job... no, not that kind of job, I meant RIM (Research in Motion), as in, surrender and move over to Wayland same as they did with dropping Crackberry OS/phones and moved to Android. But I'm not sure why, rumor has it something in the water in South Africa makes it impossible for people to give up beating even a dead horse.

Although by now, even if they did that, it'd be a day late and a dollar short, just as it was for the fat greeks at RIM....

Some people never learn. Maybe they're constitutionally incapable of learning.