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Comment by stesch | Hacker News Reader

But somehow canonical doesn't like it and has to implement Mir.

You are literally the first comment in the entire thread and you have nothing to offer but to chide Canonical, who by the way, were not even mentioned in the article. Neither was Ubuntu. In fact, you have to go about 4-5 threads deep in the comments to see a mention of Ubuntu or Canonical (specifically).

This article is about Wayland. Do you have any thoughts on Wayland? Weston? The future? X, even? Maybe some specific question about Mir and how it relates to thing things Wayland wants to do as well? The advantages of one vs the other? No? You don't have anything constructive to add? Greeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaat.

It's times like these I wish I could downvote a comment more than once.

Given that the Mir discussion was on the front page some hours ago, this comment does have something _constructive_ to add.

There is literally _nothing_ constructive about the comment. Related to recent news? Yes. Topical? Sure. Snitty? Yup. Constructive? Nope.

Who said comments need to be constructive? We don't have to be working towards a better future every single second of the day, you know.

Welcome to HackerNews. Please read this: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial."

Tell fingerprinter this about being civil.

Yes, that's great, but that's got nothing to do with being constructive. Constructive comments are great, but someone could publish a long and interesting comment criticizing wayland or X11 without suggesting ways to improve. As long as the points are cogent, then the comment should make for worthy material. At no point do such criticisms have to make suggestions on how to improve wayland or X11. Just that they are civil, and substantial. Like you said.

Or maybe you're agreeing with me? It seems strange to redirect me to the newbie guide then.

I took constructive as in constructive to the conversation, not to the person in general.

The definition of constructive is to serve a purpose, whether negative or positive it doesn't matter.

I hope you're happy when you watch a superior open source project stagnate before it had a chance to grow.

What make one project superior to the other, besides your opinion? Open source is darwinian. If one project proves its superiority, development will shift and other projects will change. I would think that, as a hacker community, we could accept that.

First, I mean superior to X, not other hypothetical versions of wayland.

I am worried that the manpower will be divided and that minor decisions now will fuck up cross communal efforts. That's a reasonable belief.

It is a reasonable belief. And I'm not criticizing you for having it. Still, this process has repeated itself for a long time. Its not always fast and the best doesn't always win, but its how things seem to work.

It's not /exactly/ darwinian when one project is being driven by an organization with clout and corporate partnerships. If you're Nvidia/AMD/Intel, which project would you be more receptive toward throwing your weight behind? The rinky-dinky band of Linux hackers with good intentions, or Canonical?

What the manufacturers decide to do is critical, and I promise you they aren't taking some kind of meritocratic open-source approach to evaluating where to place their resources.

The most likely outcome is the Canonical toils away themselves on Mir, and everyone else works on Wayland/Weston. Maybe at some point Canonical decides that it's better to just use Wayland, but that's about it.

Wayland is already at 1.0, and has support from Valve, Nvidia, and AMD behind it. I don't see it disappearing soon. Especially since the implementation of Mir isn't even usable yet (while Wayland is).

Wayland has support from NVidia and AMD behind it? That's news to me. Last time I heard NVidia announced that they will never support KMS.

I agree with ginko, is there some supporting evidence you have that points to support from NVIDIA?

If so, that's a pretty interesting development.

---

EDIT: Thanks for the update ElliotH!

Sadly, it seems neither Nvidia or AMD have specific plans for this:

Nvidia http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE5M...

AMD http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2N...

A great pity.

Ok, I may have misread something, but I was going off of this[1], which was posted elsewhere. I could have sworn that a comment from one of the Wayland devs claimed that Nvidia, AMD, Valve were on-board (at least tentatively) with Wayland, but I can't find that post now.

[1] https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts/jDq6BAgd...

"Somehow"?

They've given a specific list of reasons. If you're going to complain about it, at least refute their specific technical reasons if you want your complaint to have any credibility.

specific? They are pretty damn vague, not to mention completely wrong. See e.g. the comments from X.org/Wayland developers at:

https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts/jDq6BAgd...

Yes, they got one thing wrong though it's already been corrected in Canonical's design document.

But it seems to me that the main problem Canonical had with Wayland was that they wanted to run their stack on devices that only had Android device drivers. As far as I can tell Wayland relies on things like KMS to function, and at the very least Firefox OS has no plans to use Wayland because they don't think they can get it to use the Android drivers they're planning on using.

That seems like a very good and practical reason to me. As far as I could tell, Wayland is very much tied to KMS, and not interested in doing otherwise.

Wayland already had a proof-of-concept Android backend that worked with Android drivers.

> As far as I can tell Wayland relies on things like KMS to function

Is this a limitation of Wayland or the reference implementation? If I'm not mistaken the server needs a modesetting api, not necessarily KMS.

The server runs on top of a modesetting API (kernel modesetting, OpenWF Display or similar)

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

So much the worse for using Android. It's past time that we have proper Linux on phones without interposing all the Google-Java stuff.

I believe this was referring to the Android kernel patches, not the Java-based userland.

Java, or rather Dalvik, has absolutely nothing to do with the kernel or graphics stack in Android.

They've given a specific list of reasons.

Reasons that mean nothing to those of us that don't understand display servers and/or composting.

If you're going to complain about it, at least refute their specific technical reasons if you want your complaint to have any credibility.

I can't, and I don't think any of us meaningfully can unless there are some X, Wayland or Mir developers lurking around HN.

But I think the Wayland dev's google plus post [3] mailing list post [2] and IRC log [1] all give the impression that that list of reasons offered up by Ubuntu is, at least in part, bunk or could be addressed upstream in wayland. An upstream project that Ubuntu was already involved in for years and had the power to shape but never actually voiced their concerns when wayland's architecture didn't meet ubuntu's requirements. Ubuntu is free not to reveal the real reasons behind their decision, but unless they do the whole thing is dripping in Not Invented Here syndrome.

In fact, it seems like from the Wayland community, the problem isn't that Ubuntu is striking it out on their own, its that they're distributing a bunch of miss-understanding about Wayland in the process.

    01:16 <RAOF [Ubuntu dev]> We're not forking wayland; that's part of what krh [Wayland lead] is annoyed with?
    01:17 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: he said he was annoyed with you having a wiki page full of missunderstandings of how wayland work.

[1] http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1

[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...

[3] https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts

Why is this a bad thing? Why is it not a cause for celebration that we have two, rather than one, parallel attempts to replace X?

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an awkward thing. The problematic thing is that for graphics drivers to work on linux they need to interface with X.

This means that the closed-source drivers are tightly coupled with X and can only be made to work with Wayland by the Nvidia and AMD teams themselves.

Now Ubuntu comes along, looks at wayland and decides that it is not good enough for some reasons they _hopefully_ have thought long and hard about and starts working on an alternative.

But Ubuntu actually has enough clout to convince AMD and NVidia to work with them on this new system. This means wayland is effectively shut out and might as well call it quits.

So the awkward thing is that we were promised a clean, fast well architected system for years which after years of development finally reached 1.0 and seems to be quite usable. At that precise point the only company capable of making wayland real-world stuff changes his mind and decides on going all-in on some software we don't know if even exists yet and for some magical reason is better than Wayland.

Everyone is just stunned :P

1/ Mir is dependent on a proprietary Boost software license, and, should it follow Canonical's normal path, will require you to assign your work to them to contribute. Properietary dependencies and a requirement to hand over your code to a commercial entity can be considered open source, in much the same way that, say, OpenSolaris was, with similar pitfalls. For something so foundational, that's not great.

2/ NIH is a bad reason for parallel projects.

3/ The major reason that nothing has unseated X, despite its very longstanding, well-known problems, is because nothing has had momentum until Wayland. Canonical seem determined to deep-six that momentum with a piece of software that will require other Linux environments to buy into a company-owned replacement. This seems likely to fragment the effort it a toxic way, with two incompatible replacements splitting not just graphics development efforts, but splitting app developers.

Don't disagree with you overall, but I do have one nitpicl. There is nothing proprietary about the Boost license. Boost license is quite similar to MIT license.

Perhaps I'm misreading what appears to be the Mir license block:

GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source (Boost Software License - Version 1.0) Commercial subscription expires 2022-09-24

What is there to misread? Boost Software License is there?

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html :

Boost Software License (#boost) This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

Mir is likely to be influenced by Canonical's experience using Surface Flinger as a compositor for Ubuntu Touch.

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