ad 2: I see and yes, it is of course possible that the Xorg community would do something similar. It is, however, a lot less likely. One important thing to keep in mind is that the latter group's product is infrastructure and people working on such do tend to have different priorities than people working on user interfaces.
The fact that they kept a lot of legacy features working for so long inspite none of the modern toolkits needing any should be a good hint regarding their mindset.
I would put them more in the category of the likes of groups working on other services, e.g. Apache or Samba
ad 3: I think these are actually good examples of not pulling the rug. The change of the first link did not happen because allegedly Canonical found it unlikely that the technology would become available in the timeframe they wanted. Pulling the rug would have been more like going along with it anyway
The change announced in the second article has also been postponed due to stability concerns. Again a good example of not pulling the rug.
In either case, i.e. both for Wayland and Mir, there is built-in compatibility for applications using X, because the people involved are aware of the need for it. In my books again a very good example of not pulling the rug
ad 4: neither OEMs nor Microsoft are anologies or counter examples, because they do not ship a kernel licensed under GPL. As I wrote before, the problem is not unwillingness on either the distribution's or Nvidia's part, but a legal one.
Nvidia chose to use a proprietary code base for their driver which is incompatible wth the GPL used by the Linux kernel. Nobody can distribute these two together without violating licenses.
Or from a different point of view: people have been talking to Nvidia for years, but have so far not been able to convince them to relicense the driver in a way that would allow it to be distributed together with the Linux kernel.
Re: tweaks
One important thing to keep in mind is that the latter group's product is infrastructure and people working on such do tend to have different priorities than people working on user interfaces.
The fact that they kept a lot of legacy features working for so long inspite none of the modern toolkits needing any should be a good hint regarding their mindset.
I would put them more in the category of the likes of groups working on other services, e.g. Apache or Samba
ad 3: I think these are actually good examples of not pulling the rug.
The change of the first link did not happen because allegedly Canonical found it unlikely that the technology would become available in the timeframe they wanted.
Pulling the rug would have been more like going along with it anyway
The change announced in the second article has also been postponed due to stability concerns. Again a good example of not pulling the rug.
In either case, i.e. both for Wayland and Mir, there is built-in compatibility for applications using X, because the people involved are aware of the need for it.
In my books again a very good example of not pulling the rug
ad 4: neither OEMs nor Microsoft are anologies or counter examples, because they do not ship a kernel licensed under GPL.
As I wrote before, the problem is not unwillingness on either the distribution's or Nvidia's part, but a legal one.
Nvidia chose to use a proprietary code base for their driver which is incompatible wth the GPL used by the Linux kernel.
Nobody can distribute these two together without violating licenses.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Module-HOWTO/copyright.html
http://linux-beta.slashdot.org/story/02/11/05/0051225/gpl-issues-surrounding-commercial-device-drivers
Or from a different point of view: people have been talking to Nvidia for years, but have so far not been able to convince them to relicense the driver in a way that would allow it to be distributed together with the Linux kernel.