I find the dissonance of this conversation and the optimism of Gabe Newell in the "Gaming on Linux" article fascinating.
Graphics has been screwed up on Linux ever since the 3dfx Voodoo 1 and nVidia TNT wars. It spilled over into the ARM SoC space.
I don't know what the answer is, but I recognize that chip companies not supporting someone's efforts to make their software useful on that company's chip for more people is mind boggling.
It's about maintaining a clean codebase. If a maintainer believes that a proposal is genuinely the wrong way to achieve a goal, it is counterproductive to accept it. This happens all the time in the Linux kernel for instance, where one or more further iterations are required to get something accepted. It's just juvenile to stamp ones feet because some upstream disagrees with a particular approach. You argue the technical merits, and then you live with their decision by going your own way or revamping your submission. It's hard to imagine open source working any other way.
So you're saying Wilson thought Mir would allow a clean code base a few days ago when he accepted a Mir patch and now he doesn't, despite not giving any technical reasons for the change in opinion? (Me - complete outside but the turn of events sure sounds fishy).
The answer to un-screwing Linux graphics is Wayland, and every major player in the ecosystem agreed to it. Then Ubuntu decided to go their own way so the other players are freezing Ubuntu out.
Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. As a condition on the exercise of this right, We agree to also license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission Date.
That doesn't make sense. At the time, Wayland was more ready than a project written from scratch. Their initial manifesto also called out a bunch of things as failings of Wayland that were patently false. The Wayland core devs also did not know that Ubuntu was having these issues, IIRC.
So either:
1) Ubuntu didn't understand Wayland at all, amd decided to write their own from scratch without talking to or consulting the Wayland devs.
Or
2) Ubuntu has an ulterior motive (e.g. Not-Invented-Here-syndrome).
The hardware supports it. The specs are open. But they don't have to take responsibility for any patch that rolls their way. When you accept a patch like this, that means you have to be responsible for fixing it if it breaks. If Ubuntu wants to make their own window manager separate from everyone else, they can maintain their own Intel driver patches too.
Graphics has been screwed up on Linux ever since the 3dfx Voodoo 1 and nVidia TNT wars. It spilled over into the ARM SoC space.
I don't know what the answer is, but I recognize that chip companies not supporting someone's efforts to make their software useful on that company's chip for more people is mind boggling.