Looks like the last time files were changed was Sept of 2009. Obviously, I haven't used it since then.
I think it stems from the 'Linux' way of doing things, which is to give as much information as possible, I like it, but I can see how it's off putting to some people.
What is that based on exactly?
I'm a proponent of RHEL/Fedora, but still, Ubuntu can upgrade from LTS to bleeding edge fairly easily. Try that with RHEL.
My experience has been to have trouble with both bleeding edges, Fedora or non-LTS Ubuntu. I don't freak out though, as I know the purpose of the bleeding edge is to suffer the bugs so the RHEL/LTS folks of the world don't have to. That said, using a release backward from current for Fedora or non-LTS Ubuntu usually is pretty stable, supposing you're on your game enough to upgrade before repo EOL.
/endrant
Meanwhile, my own experience with the Red Hat family is with CentOS, which is either kept artificially out of date for security reasons ("bleeding edge" is well-named, generally) or else I only ever saw poorly-configured old versions. So I don't know enough to compare it, but I'm comfortable with the Debian family so I'm sticking with Ubuntu.
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 files down.
4. Dec 31 - All accounts closed, data "erased"
5. [BONUS] March '15 - Data actually erased to provide a few months of emergency
recovery for the few folks that didn't know and are emailing frantically that
their family photos are up there.The biggest cost here is to the Ubuntu reputation. They stand on the promise of LTS releases: with the quick timeline for removal of support from what could be a critical piece of customer infrastructure they signal that they are willing to sacrifice relationships for convenience.
Regardless, for an online backup/sync service, I think a very compassionate ramp-down plan is on the order of 6 months with a few secret months of emergency recovery in the cases where people "forgot their child birth pictures were on there!" and the like.
If it wasn't a "backup your life" service, sure, a more aggressive ramp-down is fine... but for a service that tried for a few years to convince you to stick you life in it, I think it's overly aggressive.
I can't imagine their burn rate is _so high_ that it is not something they could have funded for a few extra months.
Anyway, just my opinion... a few of you have pointed out "how long does it take to move your data?" -- sure, if you are paying attention, have a stable/non-metered connection in a 1st world country and are always ontop of things the moment they happen... you are right, a few days maybe.
I am thinking of that small 10-15% of stragglers that miss the emails, miss the announcements and legitimately have important information sitting in One and don't realize it's gone until too late.
I'm pre-emptively feeling compassion for them :)
Not that it changes things a lot, but two months is definitely better than one. They probably have data to back their decision.
EDIT: I misread the post, there's not difference. Sorry for the noise.
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 music was instantly available at my new office. When I'm working and I need a file on my Windows machine, I just throw it in Ubuntu One and switch keyboards.
I'm disappointed by this, but not surprised. They haven't been doing anything with the product in a long time.
I had hoped that just meant it was a stable product.
This being said, it did have its warts (for example sometimes when uploading a file the app hung for no reason; there was even one time when I had some files reverted to an older version).
I understand their decision and I think it is better to discontinue a service than to keep it running without improving it. I guess it's time to switch...
What do you mean? I used it for years on both Ubuntu and Fedora, never had an issue.
The web interface gives a progress indication, so why not the native application? It's very very poor.
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.
That's not true. The code must be checked for licensing issues; certain parts may depend on components they don't intend to release, or on third-party ones they can't release. It must also be checked to make sure it doesn't have any security implications (credentials, information about internal architectures, etc). Finally, releasing it may expose them to patent attacks of which existence they might not even be aware.
Then hopefully that code isn't in the same repository during develoment, but as a separate library. Everything else makes no sense.
The open source code can be useful even if it doesn't run without the library you didn't release.
> or on third-party ones they can't release.
Again, I hope for you, you didn't check in this stuff in your main code repository.
> It must also be checked to make sure it doesn't have any security implications (credentials, information about internal architectures, etc).
If your code has hard coded credentials you should probably start by firing your developers. As for the architecture part, if you need to do security by obscurity you're doing it wrong anyways.
> Finally, releasing it may expose them to patent attacks of which existence they might not even be aware.
Not for canonical, they're based in the UK and there are no software patents in Europe :)
But okay, that might be an issue for some US based companies.
Edit: IANAL, the situation might be a bit different in the UK than in the rest of europe, so I might be wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...
Can anyone explain to me why every cloud drive is using their own proprietary protocols to do the same thing? Why we have to install a different client for each vendor? That's one thing that annoys me greatly, and I'll never use Dropbox as long as its syncing tool is proprietary.
Does anyone else remember when companies were proud that they were the custodians of a file format? Once things went to the internet it seems like that stuff is no longer important to companies.
Why is that troubling? Why should a service provider open source the software that they use for providing the service? You're not 'receiving' the software code of the server parts -- providing the storage functionality -- but are just using that.
In this case, the Ubuntu One client software and protocol libraries were already open source, and their statement suggests that they will also be open sourcing the server software code shortly.
As another example and similar case -- server software code that implements the storage functionality not available as open source -- is this quote on Tarsnap:
> While the Tarsnap code is not distributed under an open source license, Tarsnap contributes back to the open source community via bug fixes and enhancements to [...]
In these cases, the storage parts implement the competitive advantages for the provider. Now that Ubuntu One is stopping to leverage that competitive advantage, it remains a classy move to open source their implementation.
Plenty of companies have been jealous custodians of their file format to prevent interoperability.
Amazon's S3 interface seems to be widely emulated by cloud storage providers. Although that's very far from a complete sync solution.
No. When was that?
> 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.
Ok, so do users really rely so heavily on Ubuntu One? If so, then why do you shut it down? If no, then why do you say they rely on it?
I believe they don't rely on it.
"The Ubuntu One file services 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."
1.5 months? Really?
From the article:
> Additionally, the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage.
In other words, they can't compete with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and whatever flavor of the week is next week. It's a distraction, so they're focusing on making the OS better and getting out of the cloud storage business.
They can probably tell that there are people who rely on it (active usage logs and all that), and to those people this is a Big Deal. But those are also the people that would be underserved by U1 going forward, so it's best if they get out now.
Out of the 4 of our peers you mentioned, two are sizable companies in their own right but are dedicated to their essentially one product, and the other two are products produced by giant mega-corporations that have room for product teams as large as us, Box, and DropBox put together.
It ain't easy, being cloudy.
I wonder what they'll try next.
Do you really find it strange that some users could rely on a service, but that service is also not worth continuing?
>If no, then why do you say they rely on it?
Which is more likely to be wrong?
1) There exist users that rely on Ubuntu One
2) There are absolutely no users that rely on Ubuntu One.
I guess a server OS is also not a strategic priority. Oh well. What is a good Debian-based server OS that is a bit more up-to-date than Debian (and also a strategic priority for its developer)?
Any other good alternative, maybe FOSS, except Dropbox?
All open source, too. https://github.com/owncloud/
I'd rant more, but hey this is free software so I'll just switch to another distro.
viva la divergence.
Maybe automatically encrypt and backup all text files in the home directory by default, and for free. Restore encrypted backup from Ubuntu One every time a user does a reinstall or upgrade. Charge users if they want to throw in media files or binaries.
A rather bad track record for software that is there to prevent you from losing data :/
However I'm very grateful they decided to opensource it, at least I have a hope to keep implementing it.
Surely I will like to open source it, is just a 17Kb script that keeps listening and add a permission layer to create directories
Maybe companies are just capable of doing things we like and don't like and our liking them is just a cognitive bias of our historical cherry-picking of good things over bad.
You should have been OwnCloud, not a Dropbox wannabe.
Pity this didn't work out financially for Canonical, and too bad for those users that came to rely on it (but this is the issue with pretty much any service that you don't operate yourself).
2 months continued service and another 2 months data access. It could be worse but it is a long way from the best you could wish for. 12 months to 2 years after the announcement would be what I would hope for from a big company winding up a service
Are there any good open-source self-hosted options that I could run on my little box at home? Preferably something that doesn't require a special setup or deployment on a server.
I could imagine there are file-sync solutions that just need an operable SSH account somewhere and merely automate the use of rsync to do the transfers, watching files and taking care of conflicts.
That's my .02€
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge [2] http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd...
One time I needed to make something around 5 GB publicly available, and since Dropbox's free plan was too small, I used Ubuntu One.
Only after two days' worth of painful, oft-restarted uploading did I discover they require logging in to access publicly available files.
This is a mercy killing.
What are other alternatives to Ubuntu One? If they are smart, the partner with dropbox.
Check out their main page as well: http://owncloud.org/
"We will calculate the refund amount from today’s announcement, even though the service will remain available until 1 June and data available for a further two months."
Very respectable.
The price cuts from Google last week were clearly an offensive move in this space. One of the best ways to refine a market is to run it at sustainable loss and watch those that cannot compete die off. Credit to Canonical for failing fast here. I hope they decide to reassess the situation and provide tooling for a BYOCS[1]-esque abstraction. This'll permit users to roll their data from one cloud storage company to another as they all start dropping off.
As a somewhat related aside: where is amazon in the consumer commodity SaaS world? No email, no calendar, no storage (albeit they do provide mp3 storage). Do they just have no interest in providing these user services?
[1] Bring Your Own Cloud Storage
Between various bugs, shit that just plain doesn't work, cancelled projects and now Ubuntu One, it seems Canonical likes shooting themselves in the foot... Maybe if they had actually marketed Ubuntu One and made it better they could be a Dropbox competitor. Then again, maybe they just don't have the expertise to make half of this shit work.
No wonder SUSE is a billion dollar company, Red Hat a multi-billion dollar company (with over a billion in yearly revenue), and Canonical a trust fund baby...
Ubuntu one felt like an experimentation from Ubuntu to bring some money in, in hope to somehow contribute money to fund itself for lack of a better business model. It makes sense to kill the experimentations that don't bring enough profit while consuming precious resources.
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!
>Our strategic priority for Ubuntu is making the best converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops and more
If Ubuntu One wasn't of their strategic priorities, then certainly they didn't have their priorities right.
That said, I was never one to pay for DropBox or Ubuntu One because their pricing was just a little too expensive. The free tier got me enough space to share a few random files, and if I needed more than a few GB's, I've got my own infrastructure for that.
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en
"Running Linux? Stay tuned - Drive for Linux isn't ready just yet."
Are people who have Ubuntu One installed being notified? I backup with Ubuntu One and haven't got any 'imminent shutdown' messages.
At least that's what people on HN say every time other companies launch something new.