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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

This argument is actually backwards: one of the goals of the wayland project is to draw development away from X. If wayland didn't exist, people would have worked on X11 a lot more.

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It's not an argument in the first place: it's describing the current situation. Wayland does exist, and did draw development away from X.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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