I think, rather, they've collectively come to the conclusion that brownfield development sucks and greenfield development rules. Which is true, if you're a voluntary developer. It's so much fun to play in new developments, and be involved in making history (that some other sucker will maintain in future) rather than maintaining someone else's past glories.
Unfortunately, this means for third-party developers and users that the ecosystem they've built on top of is going to get thrown away, because the first-party developers have prioritised their own fun, over the utility and effectiveness of what they built.
It did not have to be like this. The early freedesktop initiative managed to massively improve XFree86/Xorg without fundamentally throwing out X11. They threw out X11 so they do stuff like this: argue with developers that wanting to know the "primary" screen so they can open on it, is fundamentally, non-negotiably, not allowed, and fuck you for even asking for it (BTW it's standard on Windows, macOS and X11): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
This is what they live for. This is why X11 has to die.
GNOME has form for this. In describing the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (CADT) development model in 2003, JWZ says:
> I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
> But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.
He managed to predict Wayland, or at least the causes of Wayland, back in 2003.
It seems like you're mixing up your dislike for some of the technical decisions made in Wayland (some of which I share, FWIW) with some weird conspiracy theory about how Freedesktop's main mission is to argue with developers.
It's more a lament. It used to be that no matter how crazy GNOME got, all GNOME-specific apps still worked in vague harmony with KDE apps, Motif apps, etc., because the common substrate was X11, and backwards-compatibility was a key concern. Coupled with FDO trying to bring more harmony and standards (XDG), times were good.
But FDO seems to have morphed into the replace-X11-with-Wayland club, or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.
I despair at how unfit Wayland is to replace X11, but the big guns are going to force its adoption anyway. People who wrote X11 applications will be compelled to rewrite all their work too, or their users will have to use them in the locked down X11 emulator that can't do anything more than Wayland lets it do, which will make some X11 applications become fundamentally useless, e.g. xwd will not capture your screen.
As an example of why I think this is bad, I'd highlight we're still seeing intense ideological fights on basic capabilities, today. We're rushing into replacement while even the basics aren't settled. IMO, people like Sebastian Wick don't feel the need to yield an inch to backwards compatibility, and Wayland to them is all about these greenfields that they get to control - by fighting on bug reports, or refusing to implement protocols. This is what we're all about to be dropped into.
> or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.
Here's the weird vague conspiracy posting again. What exactly do you think Red Hat, IBM and Canonical's desired "return on investment" is with regard to Wayland, other than just a more polished desktop that works better for most people?
Red Hat have been funding Wayland since its birth. Its main goal was not to be "more polished", but rather to ditch 30 years of backwards compatibility (which some might see as cruft), re-architect for a "modern system" (i.e. Linux-specific features), and assume it should offer better performance -- which I accept does matter, especially if you're selling OSes for laptops or tablets running on batteries. If Red Hat succeed in getting Wayland to displace X11, they gain another moat (as they already did with systemd vs initd, PulseAudio vs ALSA, and so on)
Initially, Wayland was an option, unsupported. Next step was offering Wayland as a supported option alongside X11. This is the expensive part, where their release testing and support has to cover both systems simultaneously! The sooner they ditch X11 and start saying WONTFIX to bugs and glitches, the sooner they save money!
I'm sure they're aware of just how much of the software they ship does / doesn't work with Wayland, because users file bug reports. At some point, they've decided that _this_ release is the cutover, Wayland is sufficient, e.g. there's only 20,000 open bugs against it compared to 80,000. I don't know the actual number or metrics they're using, but it worries me given how many things I know don't work for me, today which is why I use Xorg (not that I'm a paying Red Hat customer); they are not waiting for zero bugs and perfect compatibility with existing software before making it your only choice.
Snap and AppArmour work on non-Ubuntu operating systems but it's Canonical who pay for their continued development and derive the most benefit from them.
If Red Hat directly employ the main developers of Wayland and/or its most popular compositors and/or KDE/GNOME developers, they can then win customers for having better support for, and for having more access to land changes into these softwares, even if they're F/OSS adopted by other distros too.
Is your definition of "Red Hat's moat" just "things Red Hat has spent money on and made freely available to everyone"? How does that fit into any definition of a "moat"?
Who are the "main developers of Wayland"? It's a set of protocols that plenty of people contribute to; people paid by Red Hat to work on GNOME, people paid by Canonical go work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on KDE, unaffiliated people who work on wlroots and sway, people paid by various companies to work on various graphics drivers, people paid by Valve to work on SteamOS, etc etc etc. It's a process driven by consensus among implementers, not a project "developed by Red Hat".
Unfortunately, this means for third-party developers and users that the ecosystem they've built on top of is going to get thrown away, because the first-party developers have prioritised their own fun, over the utility and effectiveness of what they built.
It did not have to be like this. The early freedesktop initiative managed to massively improve XFree86/Xorg without fundamentally throwing out X11. They threw out X11 so they do stuff like this: argue with developers that wanting to know the "primary" screen so they can open on it, is fundamentally, non-negotiably, not allowed, and fuck you for even asking for it (BTW it's standard on Windows, macOS and X11): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
This is what they live for. This is why X11 has to die.
GNOME has form for this. In describing the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (CADT) development model in 2003, JWZ says:
> I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
> But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.
He managed to predict Wayland, or at least the causes of Wayland, back in 2003.