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Comment by gmueckl

6 hours ago

Not quite. Wayland was created in part to draw developers away from X. Seeking buy-in from Xorg developers specifically was a big part of it.

This seems to be implying that the creation of Wayland had some motivation that was essentially malicious toward X. Is that right?

  • This question sounds to me like you suspect some outright evil getting projected here. That would go too far. The wayland project tried to get the support of X developers early so that they could become a sort of "blessed" X successor early on. Plenty of earlier replacement attempts have failed because they couldn't get bigger community support, so this had to be part of a successful strategy. Any detrimental effects on X from that move were never a direct goal, as far as I am aware, just a consequence.

    • Yes, I do interpret your “draw development away from X” as suggesting an attempt to damage X (sorry if I misinterpreted your post, but I do think my interpretation was not really that unreasonable).

      This “blessed successor” without and detrimental effects as a main goal: that’s pretty close to my understanding of the project. IIRC some X people were involved from the beginning, right?

    • This isn't quite right? Wayland was literally created by an X11 developer who got two more main X11 developers in. It's a second system, not a competitor as such.

  • Wanting developers to switch projects doesn't have to be malicious, in fact personally i doubt there were any bad intentions in place, the developers of Wayland most likely think they're doing the right thing.