[PLUG] Ubuntu One

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 10/14/2009 07:51 PM, shirish शिरीष wrote:

> I had sent a mail sometime back and they had responded saying at that
> some point they would make it cross-platform as well. The bit about
> proprietary is news to me.

Cross platform (Assuming atleast Windows, Linux and OS X) would put them
in a competitive position to Dropbox since it would come integrated out
of the box. However the fundamental approach of a free and open source
client (the dropbox client has some binary bits in it as well) that is
connected to proprietary server side bits remains the same.

With the complete open sourcing of Launchpad, I had hoped that
proprietary software as a point of differentiation was going away but
apparently not.

I am reluctant to put my personal data on a proprietary cloud and it is
not clear to me why a pure service oriented business with the same
concept wouldn't feasible. I don't mind being charged for safe encrypted
backups and syncing across multiple systems via the cloud based on the
amount of disk space/bandwidth I consume.  For example, Amazon EC2 runs
Xen VM's on RHEL on a open API and have been enormously successful doing
so. Not sure proprietary sauce makes enough business sense to risk
contaminating the brand value. Launchpad bugs referenced at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_One has more details.

On the other hand, they do have to make money *somewhere* and perhaps
the risk/benefit equation is not what I think it is. Hard to say since
Canonical is a private company.  It should be interesting to watch this
unfold.

Rahul