The day that I can buy a computer, and have a choice on which operating system to have installed. I have bought many versions of Windows only to strip them off as soon as I get the machine (voiding the warranty in some cases). Why do I have to pay a company I never chose to use? They are fucking criminals at the heart of their revenue stream. If they ever decide to compete with software rather than licensing agreements, I'll reconsider my opinion.

That is the kind of unreadable shit, which /. is aspiring to.

We are geeks. We can get tech stories from a billion places on the web. Actually, we don't really need web browsers, if all we want to do is read tech articles. There are better news readers than browsers. We read these stories here, because we know a bunch of smart people are going to provide context in the comments. Some are programmers. Some work in the industry. Some are hobbyists. Some are fanboys. But the comments let us refine our opinions on a piece further, and god forbid, teach us something. If that is not there, I can just fire up a newsreader and read the same product without ever coming here.

I would say it is more likely to fracture GTK/QT. We all take for granted that we can jump between widget sets right now, because X handles the primitive drawing. Wayland will only draw bitmaps directly to the framebuffer, which means it will rely on the code running on the client. I can see a big problem down the road, when people realize that gtk and qt are duplicating processes, which used to be singular in X. Worse yet, these processes will be implemented differently in each library. That isn't a problem if you don't need to support both qt and gtk, but I can't think of a time in my usage, where I didn't need to run a qt app in gnome or a gtk app in kde.

To understand Wayland, you have to understand X. An X server is a program(s) running as root, which coordinates all of the aspects of a GUI interface. This includes all of the drawing and updating to the display modules in the kernel. X also managed input devices like the mouse and keyboard. However, X is not the window manager or the widget set. X simply listens to the client, and draws what it is told to. Thing like Gnome or KDE actually handle what is to be drawn, and then interface with X. If you think about that for a moment, you can see the silliness inherent in this design. The client is doing all the layout, and then having to go through a middleman. Wayland basically says, if the client is doing the work, then let them handle all of the drawing and such. Wayland only manages the communication between the clients (windows usually) and the kernel modules. This allows programs quicker access to the framebuffer. I think the best analogy would be the back when linux moved to udev instead of devfs. Instead of having an abstraction layer all clients had to query, a kernel module was added which clients could access directly.

This is it exactly. While I can't speak for all Linux users, I don't think most are die hard anything. The very existence of Linux has more to do with the stagnation Unix was facing for a variety of reasons. When I first used Linux, KDE was superior, but everyone still ran gtk applications. When Gnome took a step forward, a lot of people moved over to it. At the end of the day, Linux users will move to the set of tools, which provides the best balance between performance, functionality and aesthetic. That balance will vary by user. Instead of Gnome/KDE asking, "why won't the users accept change?", they should be asking "why didn't most users feel the direction we went represented a step forward?".

Linus doesn't need someone to pay his light bills.

Ok, I guess I'll be the one to rant about the doctrine here (where is my soap box). I think you are implying that for an application to be successful it must also be marketable. In my understanding of the whole gnu philosophy that is not the case. It neither matters that the commercial market accepts it or rejects it. The point of the code is to be useful to someone. In this instance I can't be sure if the GPL has been violated, and I believe in these gray areas a company will usually win in a legal case. The GPL is not a much without a good legal team behind it, and the FSF can't blow their resources on every case. Violations will happen. Still think of all the other people using and improving the code that aren't in violation. Some may not have the resources to purchase commercial software, but none the less have the need. To me open sourced software means that a hospital in Africa can keep patient records in a database, because there are applications they can run and improve on themselves. So if some of my code is used in such a manner, I feel it was well worth it. And since I have yet to write a single piece of perfect code, I'm glad someone else can doctor it. Because it is GPL they can't turn around and sell it without releasing that code. I have no problem with them selling it. Nor do they need to provide binaries to anyone. As long as other parts of their application operate independently they can leave that code out. But the code will still have the freedom to evolve, because it is still out there. That is why a coder would give away their code freely (as in free not beer).