Shutting down Ubuntu One file services • Hacker News Board

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#161

Post by rlpb » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 7:19 PM UTC

Touche wrote: post #127

rlpb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical provided an answer here: http://askubuntu.com/a/15295 . I think the answer is interesting, and this could apply equally well to any other vendor.

That's a silly answer. The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive advantage. The existence of dozens of these services should tell you that. The way the companies can compete is by building services on top of the cloud syncing, and by providing integrations with other services you use. That stuff makes sense to be proprietary, but the syncing itself doesn't, imo.

> The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive advantage. The existence of dozens of these services should tell you that.

I'm not sure your argument applied at the time. As technology makes progress, today's competitive advantage is tomorrow's commodity.

In any case, consider the people who pay for Dropbox today. What proportion of these people don't use integrations or services on top of the basic sync service?

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#162

Post by nisa » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #44

voyou wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard Ubuntu install includes Deja Dup, which does encrypted backups to Ubuntu One. I don't remember ever seeing much marketing of this feature from Canonical, though.

Deja-Dup however was rather buggy... for my machines it corrupted all backups I had and I had to restore data from duplicitys broken indexes for at least two more people. A rather bad track record for software that is there to prevent you from losing data :/

It's unfortunately not an exception rather than yet another indication that they need to spend some energy on polishing things and fixing bugs. At least critical one...

Ubuntu is really terrible at that.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#163

Post by toyg » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

gamerdonkey wrote: post #106

toyg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because the origins of Ubuntu One were a clear attempt at getting some SAAS money. Finding revenue streams has always been an issue for Linux distributions, especially consumer-oriented ones like Ubuntu, and UbuntuOne was yet another stab at the problem. Then they found that it's hard to compete in SAAS against giants like Microsoft and Google, where that sort of service is often a commodity driving profit…

Canonical does seem to have more trouble finding reliable revenue streams. This is probably due to their focus on more end-user-oriented support and features. Among the Linux distro 'major players', though, they're kind of the odd ones out. RedHat and SUSE have been doing pretty well for themselves. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/linux-profitabili...

RedHat and SuSe are both oriented towards enterprise server (RH) or enterprise desktop (SuSe): large-scale deployments with big support contracts.

Ubuntu has gone for consumers (home users, home servers), where nobody else ever managed to build a profitable and sustainable business in the Linux world.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#164

Post by happybeing » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 8:09 PM UTC

Anyone interested in porting the Ubuntu One code onto a new free, open source decentralized cloud network?

The spec is amazing, including client side encryption, fully anonymous, no single point of failure, no way for the network to be censored or shut down etc.

If interested check out [MaidSafe.net](http://maidsafe.net) for overview, and if you want to talk code join us on maidsafe-developers Google Group. It's launching soon and it would be fantastic to have a Ubuntu One government as one of the first apps!

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#165

Post by randunel » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 8:17 PM UTC

The only reason it's not sustainable anymore is because send-all-my-searches-to-Amazon will be opt-in, so they will have to start paying for s3. The deal where Amazon would give away cloud storage for OS-level privacy has changes since they announced the opt-in.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#166

Post by dgrant » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 8:18 PM UTC

jafaku wrote: post #134

tyleregeto wrote: post #54

I'm one of the heavy users of this. It integrates with all my devices better than other options. Google Still hasn't released a Linux client and the dropbox app has been very flakey for me in Ubuntu. I've set my phone camera pics auto sync to all my devices. All my music and photos are backed up with Ubuntu One. When I upgrade my OS version, I sync all important files here. When I switched jobs late last year, my mus…

> and the dropbox app has been very flakey for me in Ubuntu What do you mean? I used it for years on both Ubuntu and Fedora, never had an issue.

Same here, no issues for me on several machines, for several years.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#167

Post by ZenoArrow » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 8:52 PM UTC

Crito wrote: post #94

cones688 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would but I love APT As a near 100% RHEL/Fedora user I am always wondering if there is anything but a material difference between apt and yum? From using Ubuntu extensively a few years ago they seem to have near identical feature set?

Only differences that I have noticed and cared about as a home user: Yum lets you do `yum search` but Apt splits that off with `apt-cache` (this is annoying because with yum I can just swap out that 'search' with my line editor). Apt tends to be faster for equivalent operations.

I hope one day there's a command line package manager that works with both DPKG and RPM. Something tells me that will expose the real reason people stick with one over the other; remembering the package manager syntax. I feel no great allegiance to one side or the other, there's nothing of real merit I can differentiate them on, the only real result of the split is package maintainers duplicating work.

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#168

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 9:01 PM UTC

brewdad wrote: post #98

diminish wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something as important as "file storage" 12 months would be a safer option to make sure everyone was alerted and reacted. Or Ubuntu may keep the files as torrents/tars after that for up to 12 months and ask for a payment of for download.

The problem with an extended shutdown is that it eliminates any sense of urgency to act. If I know I only have 2 months to find a new provider, I'll start searching and migrating now. Give me a year, and I'll ignore the problem for 10 months before acting.

[deleted]

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#169

Post by Marazan » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 9:07 PM UTC

rkalla wrote: post #30

Did the timelines seem awfully aggressive to anyone? (June 1 service stops, July 31 all data is erased) For a service that we were suppose to be syncing our lives to, that seems like a really abrupt, customer unfriendly ramp-down. I would have expected something more like: 1. April 1 - no new accounts. 2. May 1 - can no longer add files to your existing account. 3. May - Dec - nagged/reminded constantly to pull your…

Two months notice plus two months of shutdown time? Luxury. If you want to see abrupt then MochiMedia's 2 weeks notice announcement that they were going away and taking with it probably the largest ad network for Flash games along with metrics, highscore systems, versioning, distribution and more was abrupt!

Re: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

#170

Post by jschulenklopper » Wed, Apr 02, 2014, 9:34 PM UTC

davidcollantes wrote: post #31

lawl wrote: post #24

Very awesome that they release the code. I wish all companies would open source code they don't use anymore. I mean it really doesn't cost anything pushing your old code in a github repo or something.

Where is the code?

Don't think the server code is available as open source right now. The statement was:

> Additionally, we continue to believe in the Ubuntu One file services, the quality of the code, and the user experience, so will release the code as open source software to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform.

So you might expect that they are (or will be) preparing for an open source code release shortly. A move with class, BTW.