Page 1 of 2 << [1] [2] >>

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 12:29 am (UTC)

I agree with Intel's actions. Mir is not a community project - due to the CLA, Canonical has an advantage over other contributors. They also didn't try to work with Wayland community first. And their initial Mir announcement slandered Wayland. Essentially Mir is a Canonical project exposed to the public.



Although the patch "seems rather minimal and not very invasive", the Intel team will end up having to carry it, support it, test it, update it etc going forwards. That commitment is far larger than the patch so far - who knows how big it will eventually get? Those costs should rightfully be borne by Canonical not Intel. The easiest way to ensure that is that Canonical have to keep them in their fork, support them, test them, update them etc.





From: libv

2013-09-10 01:06 am (UTC)

I disagree with the burden of the patch, as clearly explained in the main post :) And I think that Chris made his decision on that one too.



In any case, that is a decision that should be up to the actual driver developers, and should not be imposed by bad political games.



Edited at 2013-09-10 01:09 am (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 08:01 am (UTC)

Intel and Red Hat are probably the biggest open source contributor out there. As a Linux and open-source user I should be grateful and I was but until recently but not anymore. I stopped trusting those companies. I know that's wierd when talking about open-source but there are reasons to be wary and the recent NSA news are one of them.



I do not trust Canonical either because I still belive if Mir is a sucess they will at some point change the Licence of Mir to non-free Software and go Apple.





From: libv

2013-09-10 09:53 am (UTC)

If Canonical is successful with Mir, and has a userbase that likes it, then, when it decides to change the license, Mir will simply get forked.

From: libv

2013-09-10 10:19 am (UTC)

I must say that the above "who's who of reinventers" is quite unfair to Rasterman. He chose his own path, what, 15 years ago, and stuck with it. 15 years of constant honing and improving, until things are absolutely perfect. I doubt that he always had support of a giant like samsung in that time. I have profound respect for rasterman because of that.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 04:48 pm (UTC)

I'm glad you added this clarification, as it's the one thing that struck me as out of place when I followed the link.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 10:30 am (UTC)

While I despise Intel's action here, and like your blog post, I think you've got Intel's fears wrong.



The threat from Mir isn't that it is a better solution that will eventually overtake Wayland. It's that it's that this weaker solution will steal developer time and user testing away from Wayland. Intel (or at least I) believes that Wayland will eventually dominate, but will arrive there slower because of Mir (and time to market is hugely important in modern IT).



In a sense, Intel is strongarming Canonical against the reinvention of the wheel which you criticised in your introduction. While both companies have their reasons, I dont think anybody has the moral high ground here. Canonical started the mess, and Intel made it worse. In the end, Linux and its users lose.

From: libv

2013-09-10 10:54 am (UTC)

Involving the graphics driver is simply not the way. Strongarming is totally out of bounds in a mess like this. Intel should have been above this, for many many reasons.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 01:30 pm (UTC)

"Why is Canonical not allowed to do this?"



I'll bet you money that you can't find a single quote of some respected open source software developer who ever said that Canonical isn't allowed to develop their own display server. I don't see how making your own display server automatically means that everyone that YOU depend on HAS TO support you no matter how retarded your idea is.

If they want their own display server and can't convince people that it's worthwhile they'll simply have to do it on their own. As simple as that. No one has ever said they are not allowed to do what they want.

From: libv

2013-09-10 01:39 pm (UTC)

Nobody is able to stop them, that is true. But the amount of flack canonical gets for what it can rightfully do with its own resources, and now intels software fascism, is really out of proportion.



Intel as a whole does not have to support Mir. Intel graphics driver developers on the other hand will have to as it will be a large part of their customer base.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 01:51 pm (UTC)

"Who are they hurting apart from their own resources and their own users? It's not that I am applauding Canonical for their decision, but I really don't see the massive problem here."



I disagree with your view that Mir hurts nobody. In my opinion there will be a clear winner of the "post-X" era and that will be the x-server, which will get binary support from AMD and nvidia. If past experiences are any indication, neither AMD nor nvidia will support both Wayland and Mir. Canonical, as a big company, will fight for this binary support.

Once Mir is supported and used on a big fraction of all Linux PCs, we will have to wait a long time to see official support for Wayland from both companies. The same applies for display drivers for cellphone chipsets, which I expect Canonical to target, too.



So yeah, in my opinion Mir hurts Wayland, if it is successful.

From: libv

2013-09-10 02:00 pm (UTC)

Either company will drag its feet on supporting either display infrastructure. Wayland has been around for a long while now. Intel is doing its thing with wayland, which does not make nvidia or amd more keen to support it. Conversely, the fragmentation that Canonical caused, plus their use of libhybris, is not spurring either on to support Mir either. At most, canonical simply reinforces the status quo.



On the other hand, it can be argued that Wayland has all the vendor support it needs.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 02:20 pm (UTC)

Thanks you for this detailed post.

It was a nice read and explains the situation very well, especially from your side of view as a driver developer.

A good contrast to all the hatred.

From: libv

2013-09-10 02:49 pm (UTC)

It is amazing how much of this blind hatred makes it impossible for most to see the real damage being done. I think that my blog post tries hard to not take sides in the wayland versus mir battle, it focuses on the horrible move intel just made, and the damage that does. Yet only few people seem to be able to grasp that.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 02:24 pm (UTC)

My personal opinion; Canonical started throwing around just a few too many demands compared to their contributions; As much as I hate politics and know that this wasn't done by for altruistic motives Canonical had to be reminded by someone that they aren't the only fish in the pond - and Intel did that. Canonical is making decisions soley for business reasons that can be seen as specifically hurting the larger community, and it just so happens that Intel is aligned with the larger community on this issue.



One thing that isn't mentioned nearly enough is another unmentioned tidbit; Canonical will not provide support to anyone for Mir, and they are building Mir specifically for their products with no compatibility guarantee outside their ecosystem. Canonical can break the client-side Mir API daily if it suited them, and the onus is on literally everyone else to just keep up. Mir could be forked, but we already have Wayland. Mir is and will always be a Canonical-specific product, and Canonical will always be the sole proprietor. Even if someone did fork, Canonical could break the Mir api and accuse forks of 'holding back progress' and we'd get another can of worms. Supporting Mir is just a huge risk.



Canonicals products have become increasingly dependant into this sort of one-way community. Desktop enviornments and minor standards like unity panels aren't as damaging to the wider developer crowd; You can make a DE without making life terrible for hundreds of developers, or optional standards and developers can pick and choose if they like them. Canonical has gone deeper into the stack than it ever has with Mir, and *is* making life terrible for developers now.



Looking soley at the graphics aspect - I really really like the idea of competition. With the decoupling effort going into all the DEs and (hopefully) graphics cards, I'd love to see this part of the graphics stack be as interchangable as other portions of the system. Have everything be generic, so if something new and fantastic and mind-blowing comes out it would 'just work'. But Mir was done Mir the wrong way, and in reality it's about as open as a black hole and as accessible as a one-way street. Canonical has taken almost Microsoft-ish tactics recently, their pitting a product against a protocol and trying to attack the competition, and they did indeed slander Wayland heavily when they announced Mir (even after supporting Wayland).



Going 'round circle... Intel may not be an angel guarding over us, but Canonicals interest is not in the community that built it. They've been disregarding community feedback for years, and now Canonical has finally bumped up against a bigger dog and their learning the hard way that they can't shovel all their crap into everyone else without getting some of it back. A slice of humble pie is good once and a while, and event hough it'll hurt users in the short term Canonical may have to start learning to be a better citizen - which will help everyone in the long run.

From: libv

2013-09-10 02:30 pm (UTC)

The trouble is the way in which this was done, not the fact that intel openly states that it dislikes Mir. Forcing things through from the graphics driver side is wrong, and it leads to driver which is worse than it could be. Canonical might have started this war, but Intel chose to use Sarin instead of conventional weapons.

From: libv

2013-09-10 03:07 pm (UTC)

Just to let the trolls know. If it is clear to me that you're just spewing random Canonical/Mir hatred and haven't even bothered to read or understand the post to which you are replying, i will not unscreen your anonymous replies. You either read the thing, or you should go spew your hatred on the phoronix forums instead

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 03:55 pm (UTC)

From 'code fascism' to 'comments fascism'?

From: Samium Gromoff

2013-09-10 03:45 pm (UTC)

Luc, thank you for this post!



You could reference it on g+, btw : -)

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 03:58 pm (UTC)

Do you think they will get the same/different response from other vendor's driver mantainers?

Or is the decision to reject canonical's patch taken by the xorg foundation?



Also thanks for the article.

From: libv

2013-09-10 04:11 pm (UTC)

It was a decision taken by other parties than the actual driver maintainers. The driver maintainers saw no issues with this code and wanted their driver to be as universally used as possible.



In case you missed it, the X.org foundation is a dead organization that managed to lose their sole achievement of the last half a decade in about a year or so. It never had any technical leverage to begin with, but now it declared itself dead.



And that's the jist of it: the driver maintainers were perfectly ok with things, but bad politics had to undo that and make the world a tad worse for everyone.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 04:11 pm (UTC)

A bit wrong on the wayland/hybris thingie: libhybris already implemented wayland-egl. The wayland patch you mention is actually targeted at weston, and the only "hybris" part is an env variable.

From: libv

2013-09-10 04:13 pm (UTC)

Granted, but that doesn't make the whole libhybris premise harmless :)

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 04:28 pm (UTC)

Great post. Thank you. At least not everybody in the Linux community joins the army of ivory tower geeks with a bucket full of primitive hatred and justifications.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 06:36 pm (UTC)

Thankyou very much for a great read! You sir should be commended.



You kept it pretty simple considering the tech involved, you focused on what is truely the problem as I see it aswell.



I want Wayland to be a huge hit, I also want Mir to be a huge hit. Admittedly for slightly different reasons.

From: (Anonymous)

2013-09-10 06:40 pm (UTC)

I agree 100% with the post.