There is a pattern of deprecating working software and trying to replace it with experimental stuff, with the design of that experimental stuff often being oriented largely toward less-technical users, with some detriment to old/power users and the ecosystem in general. For example, Wayland compositors, unlike X Windows window managers, are complicated to implement and on top of that the Wayland protocol standardizes little. This hurts the Wayland compositor ecosystem (again, as compared to X Window managers), and the lack of standardization hurts users directly, too (because then we have to rely on compositor-specific features, thus being tied to that compositor implementation). Last time I looked there still was not any prevalent solution to injecting or logging input events, and even capturing the screen (screen shot) was dependent on the specific compositor implementation. Remember the excuse for ditching X Windows? It was X having too many extensions to the standard. But even that is better than not standardizing on expected features at all. (I know the Wayland folks excuse a lot of that stuff with "security", but that is just security theater as their security model does not makes sense. If two Linux processes are owned by the same user there is no point in restricting what one can know about the other.)

EDIT3: also see the section on this ArchWiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Input_grabbing_...

Edit: also, even breakage for users that can be fixed by adapting to the next technology (e.g., evdev -> libinput, or X Windows -> Wayland) still costs users time.

EDIT4: Note that I am not saying X Windows is "good", but the fact is Wayland's design is hostile to a lot of things that work with X Windows, instead of Wayland improving on X Windows. So how could I be content with Wayland possibly replacing Xorg?

Hutterer is surely not some evil genius nor is he part of a conspiracy; but I think that Red Hat's (or, now, IBM's) business model indeed may present some adverse incentives to software maintainers: I think Red Hat's main source of revenue is from support, but they deal in open-source software - which should be (in principle), and actually is, much easier to modify, adapt, fork, just plain use without paying Red Hat. Thus it it is necessary to have almost all relevant software maintainers on your payroll, but that is not enough, to protect their business their software needs to be "safe" from forks, that means making it unnecessarily (from a technical standpoint) complicated and reinventing everything so only your employees are familiar with the code. I am sure Red Hat employees would let the technical and power user perspective prevail given a sufficient and independent cash source, but alas, they are in IBM's employ and don't want to get fired and do want a periodical raise; so it is hard for me to believe that they don't do what is good for their employer's business.

I am not comfortable airing speculation like this given that some people will feel hurt, but I am in real fear for open-source and Linux (because, what could I use instead ...), so there's my opinion. EDIT5: my child commenter correctly pointed out that my speculation about programmers employed at companies with certain business models is FUD-y, because of the lack of evidence and appeal to fear. I guess the only thing I can say about that is that my fears are honest, I am not aiming to harm Red Hat or anybody I just observed a pattern, but have no proof, of course. Otherwise, aside from my "FUD", the core idea I was trying to get across was to think about how the design choices in creating open-source software or protocols that have the potential to become monopolistic may affect us as users. I.e., please do not accept breakage just because of some undefined "modernity", as a lot of people in fact do. Also, I think there may be some systemic societal problems that I am not smart enough to propose a solution to if Red Hat is really bad for open-source. In other words, maybe another open-source business model is needed?

EDIT2: I rambled too far off the primary topic here (libinput), so let me just say that libinput very well might be the best we can have given the requirement to support both mices and other, less efficient, input devices; and also both X Windows and Wayland. Not that I'm happy about those requirements, obviously.