Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 15, 2014 7:10 UTC (Sat) by thomas.poulsen (subscriber, #22480)
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Wow!
This is great leadership indeed.
I hope Mark gets the credit he deserves from this.
He obviously does not have a NIH-problem.

I guess it also bears well on the Mir/Wayland issue.
Upstart was needed at the time to break new grounds.
Systemd was able to learn from upstart and do even better.
This is competition and evolution at work.

With Mir and Wayland the order of events is reversed.
Mir can learn from Wayland and perhaps become even better.

How lucky we are to live such interesting times.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 15, 2014 10:15 UTC (Sat) by hunger (subscriber, #36242) [Link]

I doubt that this has any relevance for Wayland/Mir.

The Wayland/Mir situation is altogether very different from the upstart/systems one.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 15, 2014 15:49 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (4 responses)

> Wow!
> This is great leadership indeed.
> I hope Mark gets the credit he deserves from this.
> He obviously does not have a NIH-problem.
That's like saying that somebody doesn't have an alcohol problem because he only has one bottle of booze for breakfast instead of two.

> I guess it also bears well on the Mir/Wayland issue.
> Upstart was needed at the time to break new grounds.
> Systemd was able to learn from upstart and do even better.
> This is competition and evolution at work.
Not really. AIUI, the main inspirations for systemd were drawn from SMF and launchd. Lennart Poettering had this to say about Upstart: “Upstart fails hard on that, there's nothing to learn from that, there's no inspiration to get from that”.

> With Mir and Wayland the order of events is reversed.
> Mir can learn from Wayland and perhaps become even better.
There has been *no* meaningful technical criticism against Wayland from the Mir developers. The only thing Mir does is make life harder for Toolkit and application developers. That's not competition or evolution, that's NIH.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:17 UTC (Sat) by thomas.poulsen (subscriber, #22480) [Link] (3 responses)

>> He obviously does not have a NIH-problem.
>That's like saying that somebody doesn't have an alcohol problem because he only has one bottle of booze for breakfast instead of two.

I find it strange that you and others here express so strong negative feelings for Mark.
As I see it, he is leading a great distribution, that is bringing Linux to a lot of people.

>There has been *no* meaningful technical criticism against Wayland from the Mir developers. The only thing Mir does is make life harder for Toolkit and application developers. That's not competition or evolution, that's NIH.

As I remember history, he wanted to use Wayland:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

I can understand if he wants something, where he can control the pace of progress. Alternative displayservers are not yet a commodity - as alternative init-systems were not at the time of Upstart. And it is pretty central to what Canonical is doing right now on the phones.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:58 UTC (Sat) by tsmithe (guest, #57598) [Link]

In particular, he says at that link that

>> we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the
>> lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such
>> effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth
>> the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem
>> to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a
>> better alternative. So Wayland it is.

Very interesting. I really would love to know what changed.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 15, 2014 19:48 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

> As I remember history, he wanted to use Wayland:
> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Yes, he made some friendly noises at the beginning. And then he didn't do *anything* to contribute to Wayland at all. Canonical developers didn't engage in protocol design or requirements engineering, graphics driver development, toolkit porting or anything else that would be remotely helpful.
Instead, he announced Mir, which doesn't solve any problems Wayland doesn't solve, has a CLA and contributes to the fragmentation that is already holding Linux back. In total, I think Canonical does more harm than good to the Linux ecosystem.

Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Posted Feb 16, 2014 1:11 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> In total, I think Canonical does more harm than good to the Linux ecosystem.

Maybe the development side, but certainly not the user side. How many people have been exposed to Linux only through Canonical? Who would have done something similar in a similar timeframe? My guess: no one.