> That does not mean anyone is under an obligation to like it.
He’s not asking anyone to like it; in fact, an informed dislike would be much better than the reaction many people have to Wayland.
A lot of the response the Wayland maintainership receives is instead a reflex-response of uninformed people repeating out-of-date FUD they heard somewhere, without ever having actually looked into the issue themselves. Which is something you just don’t do if you think of the people on the receiving end of it as real human beings.
(That kind of scarlet-lettering does have a place! It’s a perfect tactic to allow newer community members to assist in suppressing a widespread “old evil” which the community long ago chose to excommunicate, for complex reasons that the newer community-members haven’t been around long-enough to absorb. It’s the reason people belittle/make jokes about Multi-Level Marketing schemes, pseudoscience, etc. — or in the FOSS sphere specifically, about bought-out projects like AdBlock Plus. The people who reflexively just laugh at newbs for using $thing, are acting as part of an “insulation layer” of people defending a community from a threat at the margins without really understanding the threat themselves; and they’re acting at the behest/connivance of people closer to the core of the community who do understand the threat.)
But Wayland was never excommunicated from FOSS. There is no old threat; only old arguments. The core people working on Wayland are in fact the same people who work on X. The other core people, those working at the distros who package these components, were never against Wayland; just wary at first, because they didn’t want degraded functionality. (And even then, they’ve always been shipping it on distro spins for e.g. mobile, where using X11 has never worked.)
> They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" as though that was supposed to make it ok. People have thus harbored some inherent resentment ever since.
It’s not punting when the same maintainers also write the compositor. (Yes, they do!) They’re effectively doing the same thing StackOverflow does when it tells you “this is best handled on [other StackExchange site X]”: not trying to make you Somebody Else’s Problem, but rather telling you to go to the counter two paces to your left, where they’ll trundle over wearing a different hat, and then help you solve your problem there.
The whole project of Wayland was to take a monolith with mixed responsibilities (Xorg) and refactor it so that the responsibilities were each handled in the correct places, by teams who best understood that layer of the stack. As such, “Wayland” as a project staff covers all the resulting components—they’re all outgrowths of one project. But all those resulting components are all also their own codebases, with their own growing maintainerships, with their own negotiated APIs, so that they can grow separately, be swapped out for competitor projects, etc.