this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Mir is not a good example of distro engineering, because it's an extreme case of NIH syndrome. Unlike what it is today, the original Mir was an alternative to Wayland.
The story started when Canonical decided that X isn't good enough and they needed an alternative. They chose Wayland first, exciting the entire Linux desktop community. But then they dropped Wayland in favor of the new in-house Mir project, citing several drawbacks to Wayland. The Wayland community responded with several articles explaining why Canonicals concerns were unwarranted. But in typical Canonical style, they simply neglected all the replies and stuck with Mir.
This irked the entire Linux community who promised to promote Wayland and not support Mir at all. This continued for a while until Canonical realized their mistake late, like always. Then they repurposed Mir as a Wayland compositor.
Now this is a repeating story. You see this with Flatpak vs Snap, Incus vs LXD, etc. The amount of high handedness we see from Canonical is incredible.
FYI my understanding is that Incus is forked from LXD, because nobody trusts Canonical any longer. I don't think LXD itself is them doing the thing that makes them untrustworthy.
You might be referring to something they have done since then, apologies if I misunderstood. Wouldn't be surprised if they tried to make it a Snap or force Snaps into it.
https://linuxiac.com/incus-project-lxd-fork/
LXD was under the Linux containers project earlier. After the Canonical takeover of LXD, the following changes were made:
The first point means that Incus is the true successor of the original LXD. The current LXD is a jealously guarded pet project of Canonical in the same manner as Snap and Mir.
As for the second point, I'm usually a proponent of AGPL. But CLA corrupts it so much that it's more harmful than with a permissive license. The real intention of this license change is to prevent Incus from incorporating changes from LXD (since the copyleft license of LXD code is incompatible with the permissive license of Incus). Meanwhile LXD continues to incorporate changes from Incus, although the Incus developers haven't signed any CLA. This move by Canonical is in very bad faith, IMO.
So yes - I consider LXD to be untrustworthy. But that doesn't cover the old LXD code, its developers or its community. Those transformed fully into the Incus project the same way OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice. And I don't trust the LXD name anymore in the same way nobody trusted the OpenOffice name after the fork (before it was donated to the Apache foundation).
Oh, yep, that's shady and bad behavior. Thank you.