Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#81

Post by kintamanimatt » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

tarabukka wrote: post #60

phaemon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Of course. Why else would Canonical have used the GPL for the software they'd developed? Why else would they release their OS for free? Profits have clearly never been their overriding reason for existence and they look very much like a social enterprise to me. See, this is why I hate cynicism: it's intellectually lazy. It doesn't bother looking at the actual detail of any particular case, just hand-waves away d…

The Amazon advertising fiasco? The commercial "Ubuntu Software Center"? The lack of upstream patches for many years? Debian maintainers and Red Hat wouldn't even thinking of pulling off that kind of junk. It's not about deeply analysing every possible motivation for every single thing involving them -- Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.

Fundamentally, Canonical is a business that's developing an open source operating system to compete with the likes of Windows and OS X, and they're making decent headway. They have bills and salaries to pay and affiliate marketing is one experiment they're trying in order to increase their revenues, albeit one I don't necessarily like or agree with. I have no issue with them running an app store, again, because they have employees and offices and stuff.

Regarding upstream patches, whatever your feelings about it, this is the nature of the FOSS beast. They're not obligated to do such a thing, but upstream contributions are only one way they can contribute to the open source movement. I'd argue that their other contributions (marketing, usable n00b friendly desktop Linux) far outweigh their lack of upstream contributions. I would, however, love it if they'd make this a priority also.

I hope Canonical becomes increasingly financially successful. I don't know how profitable they are but it's hard to give your product away for free and make a healthy profit in the process. As of 2009, they had at most $60k of revenue per employee, which almost certainly indicates a loss.

> Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.

Speaking of which, I should probably go donate something after using Ubuntu for years.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#82

Post by namlem » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 2:50 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #78

pestaa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could also argue they are discovering a niche (developers who need to get on the go really fast, really often), so they're entering a tiny fraction of one market only. I guess it all comes down to perspective.

I'm not sure if this is a real niche. For the device to be any use to a developer, you'd really need an external monitor and keyboard. So you're looking at a developer who for some reason can bring a phone places, cannot bring a Macbook Air or something places, and has monitors and keyboards available everywhere they bring the phone. Does this actually fit anyone's situation?

Maybe it'll become useful in the future with thin, flexible screens. You could carry your 21" monitor in your backpack and your computer in your pocket.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#83

Post by mcintyre1994 » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 3:20 PM UTC

Kequc wrote: post #35

Lets see I can buy an Android phone for $300 that runs an operating system that is state of the art and one of the world's largest tech giants is currently spending a billion dollars developing. Or I can buy a $800 phone for neckbeards that runs Ubuntu, an operating system that hasn't made headway in approximately a decade.

> an operating system that hasn't made headway in approximately a decade.

Hmm, that seems a little harsh. One of the biggest names in desktop Linux, and the third largest Linux distro on production web servers[1] seems like making significant headway. Searching "Linux" on duckduckgo, which should avoid any bias from me having visited their site before from Google, they're the first distro to come up and third result overall.

[1] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#84

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 3:22 PM UTC

zombio wrote: post #10

Given the nature of this campaign the boost at the end will probably be larger. There will be a lot of hype when the final day comes and everyone will want to get their phones before it closes.

There's not going to be hype if they're ten or twenty million dollars from the goal on the last day.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#85

Post by pessimizer » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 3:42 PM UTC

Kequc wrote: post #35

Lets see I can buy an Android phone for $300 that runs an operating system that is state of the art and one of the world's largest tech giants is currently spending a billion dollars developing. Or I can buy a $800 phone for neckbeards that runs Ubuntu, an operating system that hasn't made headway in approximately a decade.

The entire appliance model of Android, iOS, and the new App ecosystem is such a throwback that I'm surprised that you don't have to insert a cartridge to switch applications. Android is not a general purpose operating system, intentionally. It's a new false scarcity distribution model that's designed to largely withstand the pressures of the Internet's zero-friction instant scaling.

Ubuntu, though annoying, is a general purpose operating system.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#86

Post by charlesray » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 3:46 PM UTC

mikegioia wrote: post #69

charlesray wrote: post #59

I don't know why anyone would want to use an Ubuntu smartphone, excluding the obvious free software implications. It's guaranteed to be worse than virtually everything else on the market. And why would Canonical even want to get into this business. You're competing against Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry. They cannot win.

What a naive, ignorant comment. > I don't know why anyone would want to use an Ubuntu smartphone, excluding the obvious free software implications. So... you do know why. > It's guaranteed to be worse than virtually everything else on the market. This is a personal guess you made. > And why would Canonical even want to get into this business. You're competing against Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry. They cann…

>So... you do know why.

Oh shit, did I accidentally click on Reddit?

>How many comments and posts over the last few weeks have been all about the NSA snooping on your data with these big corps handing everything over?

I don't know, I haven't written any of those comments.

>They cannot win if the world was full of people who thought and acted like you, but I'd put my money that it isn't and that organizations like Canonical can (and should) compete against big tech companies.

They can't win if the phone market is in any way based on merit. Canonical's only hope lies in the massive success of a truly awful phone like the Galaxy S series.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#87

Post by jiggy2011 » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 4:12 PM UTC

namlem wrote: post #82

rsynnott wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if this is a real niche. For the device to be any use to a developer, you'd really need an external monitor and keyboard. So you're looking at a developer who for some reason can bring a phone places, cannot bring a Macbook Air or something places, and has monitors and keyboards available everywhere they bring the phone. Does this actually fit anyone's situation?

Maybe it'll become useful in the future with thin, flexible screens. You could carry your 21" monitor in your backpack and your computer in your pocket.

At that point you may as well just take a laptop. The only real advantage I can see might be cost saving, but this is probably fairly negligible.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#88

Post by 1O0101ll100O » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

The price is simply too high for something that seems still too half-baked.

I know that what is 'promised' for 600-800 dollars is great but they should have proposed this phone with more solid specs. An actual demo phone would have been nice to see. I also think it would help to have more of an idea of how powerful the not-yet-named processor that I'd get next year will perform versus a trend of the Edge's current competition's processor power growth.

Finally, to me, it seems easier to add the ability to make phone calls to my favorite laptop/netbook/tablet than it would be to constrict my computer usage capabilities to an smartphone on steriods performance level.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#89

Post by toble » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

Alterlife wrote: post #7

Canoical has made the same mistakes Microsoft did by branding their phone and tablet OS "Ubuntu"... It hurt Ubuntu desktop in the process with Unity. Convergence might be the future, but the breakpoints in usability and public imagination just haven't been hit yet. I think Android and iOS have a better opportunity to scale up and meet desktop needs without alienating users than Windows explorer, Gnome 2.0 or KDE have…

Microsoft's problem was they used the Windows brand on a product that didn't support most Windows' programs.

On Linux it's a different matter because there's decades of support for different types of CPUs.

Re: Ubuntu Edge will miss $32M crowdfunding target

#90

Post by regularfry » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 5:15 PM UTC

jamii wrote: post #71

charlesray wrote: post #59

I don't know why anyone would want to use an Ubuntu smartphone, excluding the obvious free software implications. It's guaranteed to be worse than virtually everything else on the market. And why would Canonical even want to get into this business. You're competing against Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry. They cannot win.

1: Wearable computing. We already have laser projectors, laser keyboards, HUDs and optical gesture recognition. 2014 will bring physical gesture recognition (Myo). Unfortunately most phones don't support HDMI or USB out and don't have the battery capacity to support this kind of usage. That leaves you using clunky, low-powered hobbyist hardware. 2: Direct development. When your phone is your computer there is no hass…

Would have been something new if the N900 hadn't got there already, and then been piloted expertly into the ground by a flailing, incompetent Nokia. Bah, I loved that phone.