I think the short of it is that Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu, wrote an article in which he ad hominem attacks criticizers of the Mir project.
The weirdest part of this attack is that he specifically mentions certain toolkits as 'competitors' who do not support Mir but do support Windows.
When superficially reading this someone who has followed recent events might think this is about Intel, who has recently refused a patch to their graphics card drivers and are rather big in their opposition of Mir.
But when reading more carefully, it does not really make sense to call Intel a competitor of Ubuntu in any sense. And the Intel linux graphics driver project obviously does not really support Windows.
The only project that comes to mind that does fit these criteria is KWin. Why would Mark single out KWin? I don't know, but obviously Martin is rather upset about it.
I get the feeling that maybe Mark just sort of jumbled some characteristics of Mir opponents together, and the jumble accidentally fit KWin perfectly.
Whether it was intentional or not, Mark should really apologize for causing Martin to feel this way.
I don't know. I am not sure what to think about that situation.
The attacks were not really that ad hominem. While I see Martins point with the technical reasons and why that annoys him if political reasoning gets accused, his technical reasons are more grounded on policy, and the step from (technically founded) policy to politics is not that far, especially if you are someone who is convinced that your new solutions for something is great and want to see it adopted, which could be Shuttleworths position. And reactions like Intels sabotage is probably not something that is easy to accept with a smile.
And I don't think that you have to apologize for the effect of your actions, but for your mistakes. So it's not necessarily about how Martin feels, but about what Mark said - if that was indeed wrong, for every aspect of wrong. I didn't like his language comment, that was harsh and targeted against foreign speakers.
Also, there were always clashes between Ubuntu/Canonical and Kubuntu/KDE. I don't see behind the curtains, I have no overview who behaves how when they interact directly. But the language barrier and the cultural differences (isn't KDE still a bit german influenced?), and the question who holds the power, makes the situation probably prone to issues like these.
Finally, I don't think it is possible to judge about the technical aspect of the whole discussion without being familiar with the code of those projects, so it's hard to take sides based on that.
I should probably add: I was a team member ubuntuusers.de, the german ubuntu support forum Martin mentions in his post, and remember him a bit from then. This leads to a bit of sympathy, but that was years ago and details are gone, and I parted on bad terms with that team (I hope that expression fits here). So I am always not sure in which direction my history with the Ubuntu community influences my judgement of such situations. Grain of Salt and stuff.
"I think the short of it is that Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu, wrote an article in which he ad hominem attacks criticizers of the Mir project."
As someone who read that blog post for the first time today and with no context - all I can say is that it didn't come across that way to me. What I got was grousing about political motivations for a paragraph - nobody was named or called out and it was only a few sentences worth of commentary.
Now I understand that there was subtext there that I - as someone not involved in that community - undoubtedly missed. But when I read the OP then read the Shuttleworth post, I could only see it in the most oblique fashion.
The weirdest part of this attack is that he specifically mentions certain toolkits as 'competitors' who do not support Mir but do support Windows.
When superficially reading this someone who has followed recent events might think this is about Intel, who has recently refused a patch to their graphics card drivers and are rather big in their opposition of Mir.
But when reading more carefully, it does not really make sense to call Intel a competitor of Ubuntu in any sense. And the Intel linux graphics driver project obviously does not really support Windows.
The only project that comes to mind that does fit these criteria is KWin. Why would Mark single out KWin? I don't know, but obviously Martin is rather upset about it.
I get the feeling that maybe Mark just sort of jumbled some characteristics of Mir opponents together, and the jumble accidentally fit KWin perfectly.
Whether it was intentional or not, Mark should really apologize for causing Martin to feel this way.