Intel: [We] will not carry XMir patches upstream. | Hacker News Reader

Intel: [We] will not carry XMir patches upstream.

cgit.freedesktop.org

36 pointsmdellabitta23 comments

It's shit like this why the open source world, Linux in particular, can't have nice things. Politics, FUD (both ways), egos and petty squabbles making every step painful and slow.

To everyone involved, fucking grow up.

Yup.

First they say opensource is awesome because you get freedom and you can fork it to will. They say you can put your ideas to code and do whatever you want.

Then the minute you actually exercise freedom, everyone will say 'why did you fork it?', 'why not use what's already there'.

At the end of the day, opensource has as much politics and bullshit as commercial ware. People just don't want to admit it.

If you fork something, don't expect the original team to accept patches for increasingly divergent codebases.

There's forking, and then there's unnecessary fragmentation.

This is not intel's statement. Please edit the heading. If Intel wanted to make a statement, they would make a article on their website. Just because the developer feels this way means nothing. In fact, it reflects poorly on Intel.

Chris, if you are reading this, please post a clarification what 'we' means. Otherwise, people will assume way for nobody's good.

Where does Intel say this? The patch is from a chris-wilson.co.uk email address, not intel.com.

Chris Wilson works for Intel and is currently the maintainer of the xf86-video-intel (hint hint) driver project.

What I'm saying is that if Intel wanted to make an official statement, I'd imagine they'd do it on their website, not via a commit to an open source project attributed to an employee's personal address.

Since I'm not in the business of manufacturing controversy to gain upvotes or drive ad clicks, I see this as nothing more "Chris Wilson says he isn't going to contribute to XMir". If Intel wants to make an official statement, that will change my mind.

Note that this seems like a purely political reason to not support xmir since the patch was initially signed off by the maintainer http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/com...

I suspect the real reason Mir exists is that Canonical felt burnt dealing with Gnome and wanted control over the display stack as a consequence.

But yeah, pretty much every technical reason they gave was a dud. The only real selling point as far as I can see is that it's pretty easy to use a SurfaceFlinger driver with it.

Some possibly related background? Not sure, I have no idea what XMir is

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY

So? Fork the driver, it's open source.

Because thats what Ubuntu needs, more fragmentation, and a little less contribution

Don't they contribute little to begin with anyway? I remember there was a bit of mudslinging last year and the hot topic was that Microsoft contributed more code to Linux than Canonical did. While I think they've done great things for the overall landscape - I don't particularly like the direction they've been going since Unity. I'm not saying that it's the wrong thing for everyone everywhere. What I don't like, in particular, is that it feels like they're closing off something that wasn't meant to be. Unfortunate as it is, I hope they continue to remain viable - as they are a stepping stone off of the Microsoft and Apple platforms.

The moment Ubuntu becomes unviable either because of their own doing or because other people in the linux community want to throw a fit and have a pissing contest is the moment I switch to Mac OS.

It's not that great. There are plenty of other distros that are just as good.

And there is the problem, I don't want to try out a 100 different distros.

You have limited yourself to the arbitrary limit of 99 distros before giving up. I'm sure you'll find a good one among the top 99 on distrowatch.com.

I think this is notable because Intel as a company is taking this stand against Canonical. Canonical in the long run is going to need support from the other two major graphics hardware vendors to make this work well. Having Intel already come out against it isn't a good start.

Perhaps Canonical shouldn't have used FUD against Wayland (which is heavily contributed to by Intel).

Just to play devil's advocate, did they spread FUD, or just say it didn't suit their purposes?

Their initial comments for why Wayland didn't suit their purposes were misguided and incorrect, and Wayland supported all of the features they said it wouldn't.

Ignorance isn't really FUD, but both their incorrect comments and their want to do their own thing hurt Wayland a lot.

The consensus from many high-profile non-Ubuntu developers was that their criticisms of Wayland reflected worse on Ubuntu than Wayland. They did say vaguely that Wayland didn't suit their purposes, but none of the specifics they provided turned out to be valid, and some of their criticism included alluding to potential security issues in Wayland that never existed.

Well that's kind of the point. Much like KDE's developers have typically refused to become maintainers of Mir-specific code while Mir is still specific only to Canonical, Intel are now telling Canonical they can maintain their own damn patchset.

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