No Mir by default in Ubuntu 13.10

Posted Oct 4, 2013 1:12 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Heck, if things designed by committee are doomed to fail, C++ has been a failure for years and years... ;)

C++ was not designed by committee. It was polished by committee. It was designed by a small group of developers. Heck, the infamous ARM carries only two authors on it's cover—yet contains pretty good description of the whole langauge including bits and pieces which were not actually implemented when it was published!

When C++ was passed to a committee it was pretty mature and more-or-less finished work. Well, except for the STL, but that work, too was made by a small group of developers.

Heck .. posix, the internet, the web ????

In all cases you can name few principal authors who did initial work and then large committees which polished the result. This is fine and this exactly as it should be. There is very simple reason for why it must be done that way: efficiency and freedom of choice.

Initially when you try to create something new efficiency (both efficiency of your team and efficiency of the end result) dominates. You can not please everyone but that's not a problem at this stage: you must make sure this thing actually works. At this point you don't have luxury to involve committee and you don't have spare capacity to add unnecessary connections, bells and whistles. Custom-made pieces rule at this stage! They may be proprietary or open source, but they are designed to precisely adhere to requirements of your team, they are not generic and you don't discuss them for years. You just go and do what you need to do. Later, when thing more-or-less works it's time to involve “community”: this will mean that the end result may not be as holistic or pretty, but it will be more customizable and will give users more choices. If you'll not do that then someone else will do that.

Sometimes process is repeated if you need serious redesign of your work. Android gives us great example with it's Honeycomb 3.x release: it was supposed to be “tablets-only” and “proprietary”, but why? The answer is obvious: 3D acceleration. When Android was conceived and implemented it was developed for a systems without 3D accelerator but that made effects slow and clunky. Android 3.0 introduced hardware acceleration and this basically required to redo a lot of things in Android. In a sense Honeycomb was beta release of Android++ and ICS was basically the first stable release of 3D-accelerated Android++. That's why they repeated the same thing they did with the initial release of an Android: first close-source beta, then bugsfixes and eventually new release.

This is similar to what Wayland guys are doing and Mir guys are doing, but it took about three years from the initial idea to the full-blown implementation to the world-wide adoption. Wayland was conceived in about the same time and it's still not in production. Mir was probably started as response to this slowness but apparently Canonical underestimated complexity of the task and overestimated availability of skilled personnel.

The only thing Steve Jobs ever personally developed was his own ego, his bank account, and some crazy, effective people-manipulation skills.

It's true that Steve Jobs have not written the iOS code, but, on the other hand, he was the guy who managed to release iPhone in 2007—complete with “every frame is perfect” ideology and usable finger-driven GUI. Yes, all the pieces which he used were actually invented by others (often they were simultaneously invented by different guys in different companies), but he was able to choose the right combination of hardware and software to make this thing actually usable. Which BTW distinguishes Steve Jobs before his exile and Steve Jobs after his exile: first Steve Jobs was able to design pretty things (Apple III, Apple Lisa, Apple Macintosh), but he had no idea how to make sellable. People talked about his creations a lot but few have bought them. Second Steve Jobs was able to invent something people would instantly like—and not just like enough to gossip, but like enough to buy.