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.