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Every FOSS project has the possibility of creating fragmentation, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Greater software selection allows more choice and offers

Every FOSS project has the possibility of creating fragmentation, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Greater software selection allows more choice and offers a better environment for competition. Some will win over others, some will find a niche market to cater, and others will be in continual completion with each other with an almost split marketshare. And while you may feel as though Mir's only aim is to fragment the Linux community, keep in mind that Ubuntu will be using QML extensively and that will be compatible with Wayland, and through the use of libhybris both Mir and Wayland can target the same display driver.

ewzimm 13y ago
Thank you. I am tired of people telling developers to stop making things, especially other developers. This is how evolution works. You have to try multiple approaches and see what works. If you have the money and developers to scratch an itch the way you want to, do it. If it works out, everyone benefits. If it doesn't work, everyone benefits by learning what went wrong. Those advocating that everyone pick one standard and stick to it are missing the point of distributed development.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  The old guys here know how the UNIX wars ended up. Supporting the idea of the jour has development costs.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    ...how the UNIX wars ended up. I'm sorry, how was that? My recollection seems to be that they all got stale and overpriced, and then GNU/Linux ate their lunch.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      It ended up with fragmentation everywhere, code full of #ifdef spaghetti to cater for all UNIX variants that one needs to support and increased development costs.
      - synchronise 13y ago
        The difference between the competition we have now and the 'UNIX wars' is all a matter of licensing. With the latter, proprietary licensing caused a large part of this fragmentation as there was no easy way of using code from one project in another to preserve compatibility. Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue.
        pjmlp 13y ago
        > Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue. Go tell that to the users that are not on the few chosen distributions for commercial vendors or without ready made packages on their repositories. Or the BSD guys that are being left out with some desktop stuff being slowly tied to Linux systems. All this happens because developers choose to leave out support for certain systems in order to minimize development efforts.
        synchronise 13y ago
        Nothing is stopping the users of those Linux distributions from grabbing the source code and dependencies and compiling any program not in their package repository, or from grabbing a different package manager like pkgsrc, and many proprietary Linux programs that are tied to a particular distro e.g. Steam have been shown to work on other distros with minimal effort. And in regards to the BSDs, what exactly are you referring to? If it's Wayland, that's being ported. If it's KMS drivers, Intel has been ported and radeon is in the process. Nouveau probably won't be ported due to the fact that they already have a pretty stable binary Nvidia driver. The only two things I can think of that aren't compatible with BSD have both been designed with exclusively Linux by the developers heading those projects, SystemD and ALSA, and even then the BSDs already have suitable substitutions with those, init and OSS. So, since there's greater cross-compatibility than ever before, how would you suppose that another nix war would erupt?
        pjmlp 13y ago
  - sciurus 13y ago
    Interesting reference. I've submitted an article that expands on the idea at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6032604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6032604
bkor 13y ago
So how would the Gtk+ developers be able to ensure that it works under Mir? Mir is distribution specific. Same for an application running under Mir. It creates lots of extra work for people who do not run Ubuntu. It will result in extra bugs as things cannot be tested. "choice", short-term benefit of trying to be first. Long term it seems really bad.
- owaislone 13y ago
  Gtk works under X, Windows and OS X. It already has a system in place that can support multiple backends and I am sure Canonical will be more than happy to write the Mir backend for Gtk. All Gtk devs have to do is to accept the patch.
D9u 13y ago
Mir's only aim is to fragment the Linux community This Linux community, is a fragment of the Unix community. That Linux community is further fragmented within itself. The BSD community is decidedly less fragmented than the Linux community. At this point, who cares what Ubuntu does? If they come up with some better ideas, then those ideas may gain traction within the greater Unix community, and if not, I don't care.

ewzimm 13y ago

Thank you. I am tired of people telling developers to stop making things, especially other developers. This is how evolution works. You have to try multiple approaches and see what works. If you have the money and developers to scratch an itch the way you want to, do it. If it works out, everyone benefits. If it doesn't work, everyone benefits by learning what went wrong. Those advocating that everyone pick one standard and stick to it are missing the point of distributed development.

pjmlp 13y ago
The old guys here know how the UNIX wars ended up. Supporting the idea of the jour has development costs.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  ...how the UNIX wars ended up. I'm sorry, how was that? My recollection seems to be that they all got stale and overpriced, and then GNU/Linux ate their lunch.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    It ended up with fragmentation everywhere, code full of #ifdef spaghetti to cater for all UNIX variants that one needs to support and increased development costs.
    - synchronise 13y ago
      The difference between the competition we have now and the 'UNIX wars' is all a matter of licensing. With the latter, proprietary licensing caused a large part of this fragmentation as there was no easy way of using code from one project in another to preserve compatibility. Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        > Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue. Go tell that to the users that are not on the few chosen distributions for commercial vendors or without ready made packages on their repositories. Or the BSD guys that are being left out with some desktop stuff being slowly tied to Linux systems. All this happens because developers choose to leave out support for certain systems in order to minimize development efforts.
        synchronise 13y ago
        Nothing is stopping the users of those Linux distributions from grabbing the source code and dependencies and compiling any program not in their package repository, or from grabbing a different package manager like pkgsrc, and many proprietary Linux programs that are tied to a particular distro e.g. Steam have been shown to work on other distros with minimal effort. And in regards to the BSDs, what exactly are you referring to? If it's Wayland, that's being ported. If it's KMS drivers, Intel has been ported and radeon is in the process. Nouveau probably won't be ported due to the fact that they already have a pretty stable binary Nvidia driver. The only two things I can think of that aren't compatible with BSD have both been designed with exclusively Linux by the developers heading those projects, SystemD and ALSA, and even then the BSDs already have suitable substitutions with those, init and OSS. So, since there's greater cross-compatibility than ever before, how would you suppose that another nix war would erupt?
        pjmlp 13y ago
- sciurus 13y ago
  Interesting reference. I've submitted an article that expands on the idea at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6032604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6032604

bkor 13y ago

So how would the Gtk+ developers be able to ensure that it works under Mir? Mir is distribution specific. Same for an application running under Mir. It creates lots of extra work for people who do not run Ubuntu. It will result in extra bugs as things cannot be tested. "choice", short-term benefit of trying to be first. Long term it seems really bad.

owaislone 13y ago
Gtk works under X, Windows and OS X. It already has a system in place that can support multiple backends and I am sure Canonical will be more than happy to write the Mir backend for Gtk. All Gtk devs have to do is to accept the patch.

D9u 13y ago

Mir's only aim is to fragment the Linux community This Linux community, is a fragment of the Unix community. That Linux community is further fragmented within itself. The BSD community is decidedly less fragmented than the Linux community. At this point, who cares what Ubuntu does? If they come up with some better ideas, then those ideas may gain traction within the greater Unix community, and if not, I don't care.