non-Unity flavours and Mir

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2013 12:06:45 AM Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> On 13-06-17 11:01 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> >> Well to start with, we can all acknowledge that everybody just wants to
> >> build something better.  And while we obviously have different ideas
> >> about what that means, we can still work together when it makes sense.
> >> There is room enough in our ecosystem for more than one display server,
> >> just as there is room enough for more than one desktop environment, more
> >> than one GUI toolkit, and more than one distro.
> > 
> > Certainly.  It's certainly possible that I'm being overly pessimistic, but
> > it looks to me like the path that Ubuntu is on now is more like a single
> > company dominated special purpose(s) Linux variant like Android than as a
> > broadly useful general purpose distribution.  As I've said before, I'm
> > sure Canonical sees the business benefit in investing their engineering
> > resources this way, but we shouldn't pretend the change isn't happening. 
> > It won't be quick (I've no idea the timeframe), but that's pretty clearly
> > the path.
> 
> I disagree. Ubuntu is whatever the community and Canonical decides it
> is. Nobody is preventing anyone from maintaining whatever they like in
> the archive, including the components that make it a general purpose
> distribution, and components required for Kubuntu to be a first class
> flavour.
> 
> A "single company dominated special purpose Linux variant" is what
> happens when the community gets denied access to modify or maintain
> parts of the archive. That is definitely not the case.

I don't think there's anyone in the Kubuntu team with the skills to pick up on 
maintenance of the non-Mir display server stack.  If Canonical narrows it's 
focus and things which the community has depended on Canonical to do fall off 
the table, the effect will be largely the same.  I don't think Canonical 
intends to block anyone, it's just a natural side effect of deciding to focus 
on one thing that other things don't get done.  The people that were depending 
on those other things are left holding the bag.

Scott K