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Canonical Shutting Down Ubuntu One File Services

jones_supa (887896) writes "Wanting to focus their efforts on their most important strategic initiatives and ensuring that the company is not spread too thin, Canonical is shutting down Ubuntu One file services. With other services now regularly offering from 25 GB to 50 GB of free storage, the personal cloud storage space wasn't a sustainable place for Canonical. As of today, it will no longer be possible to purchase storage or music from the Ubuntu One store. The Ubuntu One software will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and the Ubuntu One apps in older versions of Ubuntu and in the Ubuntu, Google, and Apple stores will be updated appropriately.

The current services will be unavailable from 1 June 2014; user content will remain available for download until 31 July, at which time it will be deleted. For a spark of solace, the company promises to open source the backend code."

11 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's a pity by pelayo · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about Dropbox or Owncloud?

  2. Another Cloud Dispersal by RichMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The non-permanence of cloud services like storage and sharing is going to be hard to solve. Sure some will last. But some will not. How do you choose the ones the will?

    How will the industry handle the increasing number of people that have suffered "cloud failure". These people are going to be reluctant to use future services.

    1. Re:Another Cloud Dispersal by Voyager529 · · Score: 5, Funny

      The non-permanence of cloud services like storage and sharing is going to be hard to solve. Sure some will last. But some will not. How do you choose the ones the will?

      Ask the NSA which one they use.

  3. Re:like always by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    they start so many project , and neither of them actually works great

    This would be my last complaint about Canonical. In any industry, 90+% of ideas are going to turn out to be unworkable. It's admirable that Canonical puts resources into trying so many in the first place. Perhaps they need to learn when to cut losses sooner, but trying is the mature approach.

    Now then, back to complaining about Canonical: they're releasing the code for the backend? Somebody tell me that the front end was just a webdav client and that the backend handled all the locking and synchronization parts so that this isn't a meaningless gesture for customers who are getting cut off with a whole two months' notice to re-design their workflows.

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  4. Re:like always by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not much different from Google. Google has long had a "throw shit at a wall and see what sticks" approach to business. But unlike Canonical, Google already had a cash cow in the form of its search service and the attached advertising services, and then later its Gmail service, so it could afford this kind of approach.

  5. One of this last good things Ubuntu by wjcofkc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pardon this post as it is heavy on opinion. If you think it's so far off the mark you want to mod me down, it would be far more productive to reply.

    Ubuntu One was a pretty big deal and one of the last good things attached to Canonical Ubuntu's name (IMHO). Hard times at Canonical perhaps? Canonical has always struck me as a company that won't be around forever, if even a few scant more years. They are always either too busy chasing unrealistic goals in the hopes of being elevated to the levels of the real major players in tech, or are busy fighting against popular trends and pushing back against the overall direction of Linux and Open Source.

    The death of Canonical is a shake up the Linux development community needs for both perspective and spurring continued innovation in Linux and Linux distributions.

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  6. as in source code? svn, git, etc by raymorris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you mean software or web pages you're developing, svn or other source control really is worth the 20 minutes or so it takes to set up the first time. Even if you're the only developer on the project. Github makes it easy to access your git repositories from anywhere if you don't have a server or dyndns.

    I didn't use source control for fifteen years because it seemed like it would be a hassle. When an employee set it up, I learned it reduces hassles.

  7. Re:FTP? by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously , why do so many people thinking transfering files is some new problem still looking for a solution? I can understand it for Windows users but Linux users really should know better.

    Because FTP only supplies the transport layer - it's not going to automatically sync the 1000 files you dropped in the FTP directory and won't do the many-to-many replication that people use to share files among multiple desktops. Even rsync gets a little cumbersome for that without a central server that they all have access to, and if you're going to set up a server, you may as well set up something like OwnCloud.

  8. Re:like always by Beuno · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now then, back to complaining about Canonical: they're releasing the code for the backend? Somebody tell me that the front end was just a webdav client and that the backend handled all the locking and synchronization parts so that this isn't a meaningless gesture for customers who are getting cut off with a whole two months' notice to re-design their workflows.

    The client is not a simple webdav client, it's a pretty complex piece of code that has been open source since day one: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~u...

    The server is a complex beast. It's the other side of the syncing protocol, it has a series of workers that do all sorts of tasks on uploaded files to present them back in a scalable, usable way, it handles music purchasing and delivering, performance metrics on the system, sharing between users, and a long etc :)

    I don't think users will care about open sourcing any of it, but others might be able to pick up where we left off.

  9. Re:FTP? by Yosho · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why do so many people suggest newfangled technologies like FTP? I can understand it for Windows users, but Linux users should be able to just use netcat.

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  10. Re:It's a pity by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 4, Funny

    Try Copy. It's cheap and you get a lot of free storage for referring people.

    You forgot to say "Tell em umafuckit sent you!".

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