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Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

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Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#61
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it's political to let Canonical keep the burden of maintaining code that only they care about...

Canonical wrote the initial patches. It stands to reason they will also be fairly heavily involved in maintaining them. That's a fairly thin argument against incorporating patches upstream. Almost by definition, most of the patches I've committed to upstream are things that I was the first person to care enough about to write a patch. It's nice to see other people use them, but the idea that "why should upstream carr…

I'm sure upstream would be more willing to work with Mir if there was technical reasons for its existence. As it stands, Mir provides no benefit to anyone but Canonical, who simply want control. That control comes at the cost of fragmenting a fragile part of the ecosystem. You can't expect the rest of the community to be okay with that.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel." I absolutely blame Intel. Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely political reasons. It's not like Ubuntu is asking Intel to do their work for them. So Canon…

> Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely political reasons. Absolutely not. Projects need to take a strong stance on what to include or not because every piece of code in there needs to be maintained.

>Projects need to take a strong stance on what to include or not because every piece of code in there needs to be maintained.

In theory maybe.

In actual reality, from the 15+ years I follow Linux/OSS, projects are all to happy to NOT maintain code, let it rot, do tons of incompatible changes in major releases, or even start from scratch whenever they feel like.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are of course assuming Ubuntu can maintain Intel drivers, which given their upstream contribution track record might be a tall order.

This is a great comment in that it shows the cognitive dissonance of slamming Canonical for trying to commit upstream while also slamming them for their past lack of upstream commits, in a handy Twitter length package.

Sorry, but sending code upstream for their distribution-specific display server (which has no technical reasons for existing) isn't benefiting the rest of the community.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond the commits. No, I see no humor or lightheartedness. Signed-off-by is not just something Chris made up, it's a pseudo-standardized line for git commit messages. Further context I'm aware of is that Chris explicitly accepted and applied the patch after working with the developers to get it right, along with other signs of cooperation. Yet mo…

> I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond the commits. Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit. (If your comment tells the whole story I am unconvinced. OK, so the guy merged a patch, then it turns out he did not in fact have the blessing of his employer, so he reverted it with a slightly snarky commit message. Any more context I should be aware of beyo…

No, I'm not about to spend days or weeks trying to impart knowledge of the history, values, and practices of the entire FOSS community on you.

You're free to continue acting smug about things you don't understand and building strawmen left and right (I note this is at least the second time in the last week you've done this), but you should stop expecting others to do the heavy lifting for you.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#65
post #41

This is a totally bullshit way of managing a FOSS project. You should never remove working code from a FOSS project if someone is already maintaining it and that someone represents a major chunk of your users. I hate that Ubuntu guys are moving away from X/Wayland (so suddenly and in a close-is way), but treating them like this indirectly is wrong. We got to play fair with the FOSS eco-system.

Not sure it deserves the down votes you got but I think you are very wrong. If you are running a project you can remove what you want, if someone wants something different enough they can fork it. If you do it early before many people are using it you will get far less complaints than when there are millions of users.

Adding code, and features places further requirements and limitations on further changes and any feature added and widely used will become nearly impossible to remove later.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#66

There is one vendor using Mir. One. I don't blame Intel for not backing it.

And there are zero using Wayland. Zero.

Ubuntu isn't planning to use Mir until the 14.10 release. [1]

GNOME 3.10 will have Wayland support later this month. [2]

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-June/037...

[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/WaylandSuppor...

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond the commits. Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit. (If your comment tells the whole story I am unconvinced. OK, so the guy merged a patch, then it turns out he did not in fact have the blessing of his employer, so he reverted it with a slightly snarky commit message. Any more context I should be aware of beyo…

No, I'm not about to spend days or weeks trying to impart knowledge of the history, values, and practices of the entire FOSS community on you. You're free to continue acting smug about things you don't understand and building strawmen left and right (I note this is at least the second time in the last week you've done this), but you should stop expecting others to do the heavy lifting for you.

You made it sound like you had inside knowledge of Intel's decision making process that is relevant here. If that's the case I think you should disclose it instead of getting mad at me or assuming it is universal knowledge.

Our thread from last week is totally unrelated to any of this. I would rather not engage in discussion that is based on personal animosity. Let's stay on topic.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not about to spend days or weeks trying to impart knowledge of the history, values, and practices of the entire FOSS community on you. You're free to continue acting smug about things you don't understand and building strawmen left and right (I note this is at least the second time in the last week you've done this), but you should stop expecting others to do the heavy lifting for you.

You made it sound like you had inside knowledge of Intel's decision making process that is relevant here. If that's the case I think you should disclose it instead of getting mad at me or assuming it is universal knowledge. Our thread from last week is totally unrelated to any of this. I would rather not engage in discussion that is based on personal animosity. Let's stay on topic.

No, I didn't make it sound like that. You are, once again, inventing a strawman, and drawing wild conclusions based on insufficient knowledge. Last week's thread is not unrelated. It shows the same pattern of inane, bad-faith behavior.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most upstreams will generally accept responsibility for keeping code working - just having it "merged" often means then handling bug reports, testing, etc. If the Intel people don't want to maintain specialized Ubuntu-only environments just to test the Mir codepaths, that's kind of their call. It probably also didn't help that Canonical employees were using it as a political football to boot other GPU vendors, e.g. h…

The old classic argument around why Linux doesn't have a rigid internal API comes to mind ( http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html ). Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software? If Canonical does the work to make the driver universal, wouldn't the whole community benefit? I'm not a big fan of letting politics ge…

> Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software?

This still increases cost on the part of Intel.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#70
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, all of their technical reasons have pretty much been debunked. The reason for Mir's existence is mainly about project control. As Matthew Garrett mentions[1], they likely need that control for Ubuntu Phone to be able to relicense the code to keep their hardware partners happy. [1] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

This is why I think licenses such as AGPL and GPLv3 are hurting open-source (and Free Software). The intentions behind them are good, but in practice they are used in parallel with commercial licenses that have nothing to do with open-source.

It's more direct and clear to state the real problem. The real problem isn't the AGPL or the GPLv3, as both of those licenses can be very good in the right context. The real problem is copyright assignment to companies like Canonical, as in practice that is equivalent to dual licensing where the second license is "let this company do whatever the fuck they want".
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