steam works pefect in GNOME shell in archlinux. unity is not a requeriment.
To add to this, I don't think SteamOS will use unity period. I suspect they'll use a custom window manager or perhaps full screen mode for steam os will be the window manager. I personally run steam in KDE without issues.
Peer review is no panacea. I'm not going to argue against open-source, but open-source is at significant risk too. You can't pull an _NSAKEY but with the resources available to the NSA it is no big feat to weaken an implementation in a non-obvious way.
Silent Circle's approach is that they sell their software to the US and UK government. If the NSA were to require them to install a secret backdoor then the NSA would be compromising the security of all of their government customers because they don't sell two different versions of their software, it is the same for all customers.
In fact, I think you may very well be correct. I think it's time for folks to take another look at this story:
http://blogs.csoonline.com/1296/an_fbi_backdoor_in_openbsd
Your analogy holds true only if both projects, being Wayland and Mir, are serving the same purpose - They aren't.
Yes, they are both a display server/protocol, and yes, they are designed to replace X, but the goals of each project couldn't be more dissimilar.
Wayland is a long needed update to X that will fix a number of issues and allows for secure buffers that only the application and server can access. Wayland is being designed for the existing Linux desktop market and is a much needed project.
Mir, while adopting some ideas from Wayland, is a completely different beast that will focus on achieving two primary objectives: A display server that runs natively on both desktop and mobile, and, being actively developed and supported by new commercial partner Valve. It makes little sense for Canonical to wait for Wayland and then extend it for these two purposes as doing so will leave Canonical years behind on a shift that is happening NOW.
Wayland is absolutely being developed with mobile and desktops in mind:
From the official wayland site itself (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/):
"Part of the Wayland project is also the Weston reference implementation of a Wayland compositor. Weston can run as an X client or under Linux KMS and ships with a few demo clients. The Weston compositor is a minimal and fast compositor and is suitable for many embedded and mobile use cases."
And that's just the reference compositor.
But there's more. Work to get Wayland running on android about a year before (april 2012) Canonical's Mir announcement : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-April/003149.html
In fact, while we're on the topic of Android, Canonical took someone else's code (libhybris) for running Wayland on Android drivers to achieve Mir support for android drivers. Here's an article about it from the author of libhybris: http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html
Quote from the article "Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself."
Oh yeah, Canonical's criticisms of Wayland (ie, their stated reasons for creating their own display server instead of going with Wayland) were so awful that they had to retract them: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODY
Regarding Valve's support... Citation please. Last I heard Valve was sticking with X and hadn't made any further comments. Unfortunately I'm unable to find a link to back this up at the moment. I *suspect* Valve is taking a wait and see approach, and they're probably silently hoping Wayland wins as Canonical has stated that Mir has no stable API/ABI, which would make it a nightmare for application developers to support. It's unclear if they'll stabilize the ABI/API in the future, but it's sounding like they won't. This is one of the major reasons why the major desktops don't want to support Mir.
Everyone has been waiting for the Year of Linux on the Desktop; this will bring the goal one step closer. The same goes for an unadulterated Linux on the Mobile where graphical applications are more easily ported from their desktop counterparts.
There is nothing stopping Wayland importing code from Mir and vice versa.
Mir can use Wayland code as Wayland is under the extremely permissive MIT license. Mir is under a dual licensing scheme. You can use it under the GPLv3 or you can give Canonical money for use of Mir in more proprietary settings. This worked really well for Qt's dual licensing with the GPLv2 (which is more permissive than v3) and KDE adoption, didn't it?
Oh and by the way, to contribute to Mir, you need to assign the copyright of your code to Canonical, so they can change the licensing terms as they see fit. However, I suspect the MIT license is permissive enough that Canonical might be okay with taking code from Wayland without copyright assignment.
What this means is that Wayland really can't use Mir code as that would require Wayland to be distributed under the GPLv3, which would ironically hinder mobile adoption. This has already been pointed out by developers: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html
I think we'll see companies tend towards Wayland for their mobile display server to avoid paying Canonical for a license.
The projects simply have different priorities for the time being and are likely to co-exist or even possibly merge when the race is over.
Or... Canonical could have been part of the development process from the start so they wouldn't have to wait to add their own improvements after Wayland was "finished". In fact, Canonical had at least one developer working on Wayland... Canonical could have voiced any concerns they had, but never even attempted to.
So as it turns out, you're right, they do have different priorities. Where you got it wrong is what those priorities are. Canonical's goal with Mir is control. You either abide by the GPLv3 or license Mir. There are no such restrictions on Wayland. With Mir, they run the show. Not unlike Unity.
To borrow from your analogy: Canonical have found a reason to require a triscrew head. They believe it will work in more environments and also, with some effort, work on systems using a hex-screw. You are not locked in to using the triscrew and don't even have to change your screwdriver head should you not be involved in porting hex-screw to tri-screw or developing tri-screws for mobile devices.
None of this affects you. These guys are building a treehouse entirely in their own backyard. You seem a little miffed simply because you know some guys that previously built a treehouse and they are renovating it. Nonsensical.
As long as Valve doesn't jump on board, I don't see this affecting anyone adversely except Canonical. Without Steam (which is a killer app on the desktop), I really don't see much chance of success for Mir. Everyone else is is going with Wayland, and while Unity has picked up some fans, it's still overall been pretty poorly received. Steam is the only thing they could have going for it.
If steam does come to Mir, then I think this scenario would be very damaging if one of the biggest killer apps for linux on the desktop is locked to one distribution (Mir could theoretically run on other distributions, but Canonical would still hold all the keys to it).
Solaris or illumos Zones on ZFS is what you want then.
Even better is SmartOS (http://smartos.org/)! It's OpenSolaris/Illumos *and* makes use of KVM and Zones (with Copy-On-Write help from ZFS). Yes, they actually ported KVM to the illumos (OpenSolaris) kernel.
No idea if it works on SPARC... but I suspect not. Maybe it will eventually?
-Cameron
You beat me to it. Gerrold is one of my absolute favorite authors, and The War Against the Chtorr was what inspired me to become a scientist almost twenty years ago. Stylistically, his prose is quite similar to Heinlein's, and gives me the same warm, fuzzy feeling.
And his Star Wolf series is essentially a "realistic" version of Star Trek - kind of what life would be like in a galactic Federation if you weren't serving on the flagship, but were just another cog in the works. The main character even has the same initials as Kirk.
I've never read Star Wolf... but I think I just might now. I heard that other book about "h.a.r.l.i.e" is good and there's references to it in the Chtorr series. When H.a.r.l.i.e Was Won or something like that?
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
