Most of you guys are missing the point, this is not your premium device of an existing manufacturer, so its moot to compare prices with nexus 4, s4, or any other premium device.
This is similar (but definitely not same) to the idea of supporting tesla by buying their very expensive models when they first came out. Those people who paid premium price for their car, because they were supportive to the idea of Tesla's vision of clean electric cars. Because of these early adopters, tesla today exists as a company and has a product.
While Ubuntu Edge is not as revolutionary as Tesla, it has some unique ideas, made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community. By buying an comparably expensive device, you are supporting open source platform and giving chance for another serious option besides the present duopoly.
Whether you agree with this vision or not is a different story, whether you think one open source option (Android) is enough is another story. But if you are comparing Edge with current mainstream device with price and feature, then this device is clearly not meant for you, but if you are supporting this device with your money because of philosophical reasons, then this device is for you, and you are the type people Ubuntu is asking for support.
> made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community.
I believe this to be a false statement. A lot of the open source and Linux community is in fact quite unhappy with Canonical, over things like their shoddy governance of projects they partnered with others on, unreasonable and sudden copyright assignment requirements and contracts, propagandistic and dishonestly comparative PR practices and willfully bringing about tech stack fragmentation. Irregardless of whether they manage to provide value to their users: A fair and reliable member of the greater community they have most certainly not been.
> Irregardless of whether they manage to provide value to their users: A fair and reliable member of the greater community they have most certainly not been.
Yeah, I think it's good to explicitly separate the idea of the linux developer community from the linux user community. Because as you mentioned, end users do seem to like the value ubuntu brings to them. And I agree that 'bringing users value' is totally orthogonal to the company being a "good" one (case in point: apple).
That being said, how is what Canonical's done in any way not an improvement from the likes of the status quo (i.e. google/microsoft/apple)? From what I see, Canonical might not be totally ideal, but certainly a step up from apple/microsoft, so why all the strong opposition? I know we all love radical idealistic revolutions, but in reality, most change happens over the course of several baby steps, and Ubuntu seems like the best baby step we have the option to embrace right now, so it's frustrating to see the linux community self-sabotage itself over things that are smaller than the greater cause of 'open-ness'.
However, I and many other content ubuntu users are not linux devs, so it's possible that the arguments against Canonical just haven't been articulated in a way that would make the consequences of their actions seem substantially significant from the user's perspective. I mean, I understand the risk of fragmentation and all that, but do I think that trumps the importance of furthering OSS? No...
I would struggle to characterise a company that brings a lawsuit claiming exclusive ownership of the very idea of graphical user interfaces as a good company.
This is all purely my own opinion of course (and you’re free to disagree), but it was based on the parent comment's branding of Canonical as a dubious company on ethical grounds when he mentioned fragmentation / community cooperation / governance / propaganda / dishonesty / etc. Apple is a great company if the metrics you're looking at are the concrete financial/economic ones, but “ethically”? I’m not a fan.
Over the years the list has become much too large for me to even remember it all personally, but some concrete examples of this off the top of my head would be:
A) how the company is structured and how it views its employees [1],
B) general overly intense secrecy (read: proprietary mindset) everywhere
C) rejecting apps without explanation and creating their own versions [2]
D) inconsistent app review process [3]
E) refusal to give to charity during the entirety of steve jobs’ run
F) patent abuse [4]
G) needless limits on products you supposedly "own" (e.g. ipad syncing being limited to 1 computer)
H) tracking users' locations without their knowledge/consent [5]
I) and most recently, the unusually long silence and delay after having a security breach in their developer portal (which I was a member of for some past work, believe it or not)
[There’s also the whole labor situation in china, but I don’t believe apple’s uniquely at fault there]
This is all fairly consistent behaviour, and it exhibits ‘personality’ traits that mirror those of an ultra-proprietary narcissist (read: steve jobs). None of this should be earth shattering to anybody, it’s always been out there in plain view. The only thing one could really disagree with is in how to react to it. Most people don’t care as they don’t see it affecting them, and that’s cool. But I do see how it can affect me, as it has already bitten me multiple times in the past, so I’m not neutral to it anymore. And I have a feeling that a lot of the people that are pro-linux/ubuntu/OSS have similar sentiments.
Don't get me wrong though, from the user’s perspective Apple does the whole customer satisfaction facade amazingly well (and they deserve credit for it), but that's not really an ethical thing when it's so obviously in their best economic interest to do that kind of stuff anyway (which is why I think more companies should follow it). And by "that kind of stuff", I mean those stories you always hear about people taking in their totally-burnt-to-a-crisp 9yr old macbooks into a genius bar, and Apple 'super generously' gives them a brand new fully-upgraded macbook pro with a free iphone to compensate, no questions asked. Sure that's a bit of an exaggerated scenario, but you can see how that would look amazing from the consumer perspective. The issue is that it’s purely a tactic to keep you loyal and faithful to the [proprietary] Apple brand. There was a study somewhere about hotel guests being significantly more loyal and likely to return to the same hotel chain after they've had a bad experience that was handled well by the hotel they were staying in -- same deal here. Apple had the marketing brilliance to intentionally craft that notorious cult-following mentality in its fans.
On it's own, that really isn't all that negative though. The problem is, that Apple is clearly (IMO) using it to push a dubious proprietary agenda that goes against almost everything OSS stands for[6], thus amplifying the influence of their questionable views exponentially. That's why something as benign as not having removable batteries on their devices is a lot more worrisome coming from Apple (if you're invested in their ecosystem). That design choice carries no ethical significance on it's own, but if the actor implementing it has a history of dubious motives, you better believe the significance of the move is no longer null, because it is but a vehicle to convey their greater intentions. This Edge phone for example doesn't look to have a removable battery either, but Canonical is not generally known for being closed about things, so such a design decision wouldn't worry me too much about investing in their platform.
The important thing to realize is that when you vote with your wallet, you're voting on more than just 'features', and these other less-visible aspects can and will affect you at some point.
I’m sure this rant is gonna get nit-picked and analyzed to hell, possibly missing the forest for the trees and all that, but it is a large reason why I don’t find Canonical to be a bad option to support -- and that’s really the main issue here.
[1] The book ‘Inside Apple’ is a really good read if you’re interested to know what it’s like in there: http://amzn.com/B00C2IFS3W
[6] I’m aware that they do have lots of OSS projects of their own, www.apple.com/opensource/ is always the first thing that’s pointed out to me when I go on an anti-apple rant. My point is that the company’s overall intentions aren’t aligned with that of the FLOSS community, and that those dubious intentions can and will bite a large segment of consumers in the ass at some point.
Basically they're building their own X replacement even though there is one in the works (Wayland) that they admit fits their needs (or could if they worked on Wayland), simply so they can have control over it. They also admit that they aren't going to bother to make it work for anyone but them, nor are they going to worry about a stable API for it (because in their minds it's only used internally, they don't care about external people who are trying to build compliance with it).
Let me report a specific example I've witnessed from the sidelines.
Some time ago, Canonical collaborated with others in the desktop space, among them the KDE community, on a specification to make system tray menus work over the D-Bus IPC system. The upshot is that it allows menus to be rendered by the shell implementation you're running instead of by the app backing the icon, improving visual consistency and giving the shell more control to e.g. tune the menu for a particular form factor. This specification was implemented for a number of toolkits, and the Qt implementation, used by KDE, was set up as a Canonical project, with code contributions from both within and outside of Canonical.
Then Canonical decided to require signing a copyright assignment contract before contributing to their projects and decided to retroactively apply this to codebases already in flight, such as the library in question. Copyright assignment is a hotly debated topic in the community and there is a widespread belief that mandatory copyright assignment is a Bad Thing in general, but in this particular case the contract they ran with was very badly crafted and deemed unacceptable by many, including a KDE developer who had contributed to the library. Canonical therefore decided to kick out the bugfixes he had contributed -- and then Ubuntu ended up shipping them anyway in the form of patches to their package, with the packagers exploiting the loophole that Canonical doesn't require holding the copyright for such patches. Other distributions were left duplicating the same work on their end.
A repository on Gitorious.org was set up as a staging area outside of Canonical to have a convenient place to host the fixed version of the library, but making this repository the new canonical (heh, sorry, pun unintended) upstream was deemed not an option because the Canonical-employed developer who had written most of the library would be unable to get approval from his employer. Eventually, if memory serves right, said employee ended up independently rewriting the KDE developer's patches to yield the same bug fixes (which, given knowledge of the original patches, sounds potentially legally sketchy to me, but IANAL) for a second round of needlessly duplicated work.
Episodes like this one are why there's not a whole lot of appetite left for collaborating with Canonical or relying on projects they steward. There's just no trust for Canonical to display any regard for the needs of their partners, or perform well in a governance role.
To be fair, the KDE team knew that they were dealing with a corporate entity that would want to retain some sort of control over how software it creates and distributes is licensed.
Signing a CLA is nothing new, in fact the FSF do exactly the same thing so they can shunt their projects to the next GPL without having to contact developers.
If developers have an issue with such an arrangement, then they shouldn't be contributing to those companies and organisations in the first place.
Note the point about starting to apply a CLA after the fact to an existing project. KDE certainly consciously took a risk when deciding to try and collaborate with a corporate entity, but that doesn't mean the community can't be disappointed at the outcome. Nobody is complaining about a CLA they knew of in advance - because they did not.
And personally I don't think a CLA makes sense for the specific code in question, which is purposefully designed as an interoperability solution and so implicitly multi-stakeholder.
No, sadly. This involves a number of private companies, and legal issues.
Let's just say that in private, canonical has taken an interesting view of the rights it has in the open source software that makes up ubuntu, and this view is, IMHO, not particularly in line with what are likely the broader expectations of the open source community.
These views are not simply restricted to trademark issues.
With the edge you have to also factor in the one year wait after putting your money down, which kills the value proposition for me. Who knows what other cool phones might be out before then? Moto X, something entirely unrevealed, etc. A year is a long, long time to wait.
It is more that Canonical is asking for trust. They gave preview specs and made the claim they would improve the hardware near release if they took too long and better tech was available. You just depend on them actually putting the good stuff in the phone.
The point is that the _aim_ is to ship a high-sec device. Normal-spec devices will be available from other sources.
We don't know what the final spec of the Edge will be, and the CPU hasn't been chosen. However, it will be able to use parts that are available for a small production run (40k) but not a large one (4 million etc).
Judging by the article's numbers, the market is vanishingly small. There are many ways I imagine the community would support Ubuntu / Canonical. Designing and manufacturing hardware is not that.
> While Ubuntu Edge is not as revolutionary as Tesla
WAIT WAIT!!! Stop right there. Name one phone other than iPhone that is as revolutionary as the Tesla.
The whole entire problem is that Ubuntu for phones derives no benefit from having this hardware, and this hardware is unlikely to be revolutionary.
I'm not "comparing Edge with current mainstream device with price and feature" I'm saying it is just exactly like any other moderately high-end phone, except it will be a little thicker and heavier because Canonical can't afford cutting edge packaging technology. Probably not as good as what Samsung will have on the market next year. Same chips. Same screen. So... why?
So, the software is different, and possibly better (I have no way of judging). How is this an improvement over porting the software to an existing phone?
It's probably even doable to make it run on the Android kernel. See, for example, Hellaphone (https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home), which is an Inferno port to Android. Take the Nexus 4, or some other nice phone, flash it with the updates, and resell it.
This is similar (but definitely not same) to the idea of supporting tesla by buying their very expensive models when they first came out. Those people who paid premium price for their car, because they were supportive to the idea of Tesla's vision of clean electric cars. Because of these early adopters, tesla today exists as a company and has a product.
While Ubuntu Edge is not as revolutionary as Tesla, it has some unique ideas, made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community. By buying an comparably expensive device, you are supporting open source platform and giving chance for another serious option besides the present duopoly.
Whether you agree with this vision or not is a different story, whether you think one open source option (Android) is enough is another story. But if you are comparing Edge with current mainstream device with price and feature, then this device is clearly not meant for you, but if you are supporting this device with your money because of philosophical reasons, then this device is for you, and you are the type people Ubuntu is asking for support.