Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors
attack a project on purely political grounds, you have
to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who
belongs to the Open Source Tea Party And to put all
the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for
approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think
about shell development. Every app developer will
consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those
same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every
important piece of the stack they can get their hands
on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and
hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to
Canonical torture the English language in their efforts
to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but
not Mir. But we’ll get it done, and it will be amazing.
In context, this was written shortly after Martin Gräßlin had said that he would not support Mir in KWin. KWin is the KDE window manager/shell; he is one of those "1% of all developers" for whom the display server really matters. And unlike what Mark claims, KWin does not support Windows (other parts of the Qt and KDE stack do, but not KWin).
So, he sees this as his time essentially being volunteered for him by Mark, to support a display server with an architecture he doesn't agree with, after he's already put the effort in to support the display server that pretty much everyone else in the desktop Linux ecosystem have been targeting. And if you don't agree with Mark, or the technical decisions made leading to Mir, you get branded as "the Open Source Tea Party", "purely political", an "outraged individual" who has "NIH'd just about every piece of the stack."
Maybe I'm being overly pedantic here, but if you're going to call out a project like systemd that is headed in the direction of being the de facto standard in all the other serious Linux distributions, you probably should have looked at the project closely enough to have seen the big deal they make of the correct spelling on their homepage (i.e. systemd vs SystemD). Actually, I'm definitely being overly pedantic here, but his completely dismissive attitude towards systemd makes this KWin post make a bit more sense. Certainly sways me in the direction of agreeing.
No I get that, and I'm not it's biggest fan either, but it's a pretty core component to take the decision lightly. Most of the arguments I see against systemd are very well informed and well reasoned. That's why I categorized his as "dismissive" - and it seems consistent with the accusation that he isn't reasonable, but just doesn't like people disagreeing with him.
seems to imply that the Ubuntu developers will either be the ones to get KDE working on their stack, or go their own way with or without kDE support. It doesn't look like Shuttleworth is insisting through this that Gräßlin devote his time to their project.
Isn't Mir supposed to have XMir as a compatibility layer anyway? Wouldn't this mean that KDE should work on top of it without extra porting work?
There were people announcing that our software will work
just fine on top of their technical stack, others posted
videos showing our software working somewhat on top of
an (IMHO idiotic) hack. It was decided on a mailinglist
I'm not subscribed to that I would walk people through
the KWin code base in a telco for adjusting KWin for
their technical stack. All of that without ever asking
whether we are interested at all. In case of the telco I
was not even asked whether I would want to participate
and whether I have time for that. I experienced this as
a constant pressure and a disrespect to our own
decisions.
It sounds an awful lot like Canonical expecting Gräßlin to spend his time on this project despite the fact that he's not interested in it at all.
Isn't Mir supposed to have XMir as a compatibility layer
anyway? Wouldn't this mean that KDE should work on top of
it without extra porting work?
I believe the XMir compatibility is supposed to be at the application level, not the window manager/compositor level.
KWin is a window manager and compositor, which is fairly specific to the precise graphics stack underneath it.
Most likely the "open source tea party" post wherein Mr. Shuttleworth collectivized and dismissed any and all critics as irrational haters with nothing of substance to say.
