Why would they drop Mir? Dropping Upstart makes sense because systemd has momentum and they both do basically the same job. With Mir vs. Wayland they already evaluated Wayland and decided it wasn't going to be suitable for their needs, unless Canonical change their target markets this isn't something that'd make sense to change (unless a later version of Wayland supports what they want).

It is the common opinion that their needs (re Wayland/Mir) are not technical, but related to defining and shipping the results product resulting of those efforts.

That's how it appears, but Canonical wouldn't duplicate work unless they thought it was in their best interests, the question then becomes what needs are they trying to meet? Perhaps the needs are technical, perhaps not.

I understand part of the issue was Canonical changing their support for Wayland, but what exactly does Mir do to make developers lives harder? Most developers don't write for X directly, nor will most developers write for Wayland or Mir directly, so as long as the library support is in place then why should we care? I don't hear Android developers complaining about Android using its own window manager. If Canonical want to pay extra for their own window manager, and are prepared to work on the libraries that make developers lives easier, what are we really losing?

"That's how it appears, but Canonical wouldn't duplicate work unless they thought it was in their best interests"

Yes, their best interests. Not to the Linux ecosystem.

Maybe if they do what's in their best interest, the best things happens for the Linux/nix ecosystem. I'm not exactly sure what your arguing about; All corporate entities seem to (perhaps quite reasonable considering they're corporations) cater to their* own interests first.

From what I've gathered, we have, as a community gained a lot from that by looking at Red Hat Inc, Canonical Ltd, SuSE GmbH/Novell/Attachmate Group and others contributions.

Give me an example where Red Hat or SuSE have started a brand new project that directly competes with an existing effort with broad support from the open source community?

Best example is probably .deb (1995) vs. .rpm (1997).

I am wondering if they are ever going to do this with bzr. I did not realize how much bzr development had slowed until I read the emacs bzr/git debate.

Unless there was an edit, they do actually make sense, if you think of this post as being rewritten in a year to discuss a move away from Mir (current Ubuntu graphics thing) to Wayland (current non-Ubuntu graphics thing that most everybody else is probably moving to).

"Ubuntu is switching from upstart to systemd in 2014" -> "Ubuntu is switching from Mir to Wayland in 2015"