[johnklos]

Discussions about the corporatization of Linux largely move on emotion. Imagine getting flagged multiple times for asserting that writing code that assumes little endianness is bad programming practice, just because someone had a talk where he suggested 32 bit should die and perhaps even all things big endian.

The speaker didn't give any reasons, mind you, why big endian should die other than handwaving about how it means "more maintenance", and the responses to "can you give any examples of how it means "more maintenance" other than saying it?" were largely, "can you give proof it's not "more maintenance"?"

I feel the same happens with Wayland. People who don't understand its position have strong feelings in both directions, yet very little discussion is about the underlying rationale for it in the first place, about who benefits by marginalizing people with non-mainstream hardware and who benefits from forcing the software ecosystem down narrower paths.

X11 and Wayland really should coexist, at least for as long as it takes for Wayland to lose a majority of its major issues, yet Wayland designers didn't seem to think that'd be worthwhile. Some of the projects that're working on making them work together need more attention than they're getting.

[bluGill]

> Wayland designers didn't seem to think that'd be worthwhile.

The Wayland designers are the people who maintained X11 for years. They have no problem with X11 coexisting so long as they don't have to work on it. However everyone demanding X11 is really demanding Wayland designers stop their work and go back to X11 - and none of them are paying for that.

There are people paid to work on Wayland - some used to be paid to work on X11 (and sometimes still are), but they convinced their boss to pay them to work on wayland instead. Since you are not their boss you don't have any input into that.

[johnklos]

> They have no problem with X11 coexisting

You have it wrong. Rather than reuse parts of X11, like the compositors that support hardware that nobody will ever be paid to support, Wayland is trying to reinvent the wheel and replace X11, with support for only what's new and/or popular.

> However everyone demanding X11 is really demanding Wayland designers stop their work and go back to X11 - and none of them are paying for that.

Absolutely nobody is demanding that Wayland developers should stop their work and go back to working on X11. Nobody. That's a ridiculous, hyperbolic statement.

What some of us would like to see is Wayland not try to make everything either/or. But, just like systemd, things started with, "you can do both", then went to, "it's harder to do both, but you can", then to, "the old way is dead, so stop writing code that supports it", and eventually to, "let's completely rip out the old way of doing it because "maintenance" and everyone will be forced to use the new way". GNOME is already doing this, even though it's supposed to be open source, platform agnostic and portable.

The fact that you bring up paid work shows you're happy to accept idea that support for things is only worth what people will pay for it. Consider how that fits with corporatization, and consider how that fits with open source in general.

In other words, should all open source project be drivable by some corporation deciding to just throw money at something?

If you think about this for more than 30 seconds, you may finally understand why those of us who aren't fans of the corporatization of Linux and aren't fans of projects that don't interoperate and ultimately end up fragmenting the open source software world are not fans of the eventual consequences of projects like Wayland.

It's not "X11 is great and Wayland sucks" - it's "why is this project fragmenting things rather than interoperating, and why are people so eager to be led by corporations in to supporting corporate interests?"