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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

"Today we are announcing plans to shut down the Ubuntu One file services. This is a tough decision, particularly when our users rely so heavily on the functionality that Ubuntu One provides"

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?

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> 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?

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.

As someone who works at SpiderOak, cloud storage isn't easy and requires a different infrastructural mindset than a traditional software vendor.

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.

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 profits in other areas. Focused companies like Dropbox can do it, but if your focus is elsewhere, then you don't have a chance.

I wonder what they'll try next.

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.

If there are people who really use it heavily, then they should give them at least 6 months, I believe. Especially because without further development efforts, just maintaining the service can't be _that_ expensive.

Perhaps the logic is that if you don't use the data for a month and a half and your only copy of the data is in ubuntu one it must not be that important?

Old photos might go unused for years at a time, until someone is getting married and needs material for a wedding slideshow video.

Is there any sort of "archival background sync" service that encapsulates Amazon Glacier in the same way Dropbox encapsulates Amazon S3?

Do you really want to wait for 5 hours just to figure out you've requested a wrong folder and the photos you're looking for were shot in June, not July?

I would assume that such a service would generate metadata indexes (incl. thumbnails) that are stored on more accessible media. That is, in fact, one of the main reasons a technical person can't just use Amazon Glacier for this directly, in the same way they could use S3 directly for Dropbox's use-case.

It's entirely plausible that the people using it rely on it heavily, but that there aren't enough people using it to justify its existence.

>Ok, so do users really rely so heavily on Ubuntu One? If so, then why do you shut it down?

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 think today is the 2nd of April, so they are providing 2 months less a day to continue using the service as normal, and an additional 2 months (for a total of 4) for users to download their data (but presumably not upload new data.)

I rely on it heavily. I have my home folder backed up and synced across machines on Ubuntu One. But I am using the free tier < 5GB. I will have to move on to other alternatives. I guess it wouldn't have been sustainable for them, seeing as others are giving a lot more in free tier. So they would have had only a handful of paying customers.

Take a look at Bittorrent Sync. It's free and unlimited (as it's peer to peer), and means your data isn't accessible to some arbitrary company.

A comp sci prof of mine uses it to synchronize notes and sample files for his lectures. I doubt he'll have trouble replacing it.

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