Ubuntu Edge

[fastesthamster]

I place part of the blame on Indiegogo and PayPal. With Kickstarter and Amazon, you'd only be charged if successful. IGG you'll be charged and then refunded into your PayPal account if unsuccessful. No brainer which one is more appealing, especially for consumers outside of the US.

 

[AirWolf]

I place part of the blame on Indiegogo and PayPal. With Kickstarter and Amazon, you'd only be charged if successful. IGG you'll be charged and then refunded into your PayPal account if unsuccessful. No brainer which one is more appealing, especially for consumers outside of the US.

What happens if some people pledge and can't/don't pay?

 

[Compton_effect]

Interesting read on the difference between Kicksarter and Indiegogo.
less-than-10-percent-of-projects-on-indiegogo-get-fully-funded

 

[Fulcrum29]

In my opinion should The Edge not make the target, then the entire product is mere a dream, not doing innovation any good…

 

[fastesthamster]

What happens if some people pledge and can't/don't pay?

On Kickstarter it's charged to a credit card linked to your Amazon account once the funding period ends. So it's not a question of don't, but can't if you don't have the funds available on your credit card. A risk, but on a $32m project? A risk worth taking.

 

[nakedpeanut]

Ya I thought why not and contributed now. I hope it does work out and they make their target I really want this kind of thing to succeed!!

Having only 1/3rd of the funds i doubt they will make it. But I secretly hope that they find a way to make the phone and give it to those who funded the campaign...

 

[SauRoNZA]

It has a broad appeal, but one thing you forget about the open source community is that they are generally stuck on "free" and therefore are as cheap as they can come.

Throw a premium cost product at them and they immediately have the logic of "I can build it cheaper myself" even though it's impossible to do so in this case.

Not to mention anyone that isn't already running Ubuntu doesn't really care and is probably scared of it.

 

[MyWorld]

It has a broad appeal, but one thing you forget about the open source community is that they are generally stuck on "free" and therefore are as cheap as they can come.

Throw a premium cost product at them and they immediately have the logic of "I can build it cheaper myself" even though it's impossible to do so in this case.

Not to mention anyone that isn't already running Ubuntu doesn't really care and is probably scared of it.

Some truths in there. Yes, a lot of the FOSS community is "cheap" with very few donating anything towards the distro they use. That being said, most of the distros do no cater for people outside their country.

Arch is my poison, I cannot donate to it because they only accept credit card payments. I would, on a regular basis, donate a small amount, and have done so for Gentoo and other projects in the past, it is just a headache getting around the international financial barriers.

The problem with Ubuntu is that they have alienated themselves from the rest of the FOSS community, a fact that I have pointed out on many occasions here in the past. They do not really contribute unless it is for their own gain.
Just a few examples off the top of my head:
They do not support other WMs and DEs, they have to have Unity. I know they are all about setting up a mobile platform at the moment, but there was projects with KDE, for example, working very well on mobile platforms in the past. Instead of taking Gnome forward and adding mobile support to Gnome, they start their own thing. (I am aware of they attitude of the Gnome devs as well, but I really feel they could have worked things out.)
Wayland is the next industry step toward X server, yet again Ubuntu is doing their own thing creating Mir. Don't help and fix or better Foss as a whole, we will just do our own, independent, thing.

And this is going to be the corporate downfall of Linux. It will be very interesting to see how Nvidia and Radeon respond to Mir, for example. Is Ubuntu big enough to force the Linux desktop in a direction of their choosing, since hardware manufactures cannot support everything out there, they will have to choose at some point, Wayland or Mir.
Very few FOSS big hitters are backing Ubuntu, and that is why so few care. If you constantly throw sand in the eyes of your other playmates while in the same sandpit, you'll end up being all alone.

 

[SauRoNZA]

What do you mean they don't support others?

Yes their "commercial" arm is strictly sticking to one finite product, which I think is really it's strength.

But they openly support Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu etc and allow you to install any of them at your leisure in top of Ubuntu.

In a way it's not unlike Redhat with Fedora and CentOS, or Suse with Opensuse and to be honest I much prefer it that way.


Canonical is a commercial company with commercial ideals in Ubuntu, but they don't lock down the platform so nobody else has access to it.

Personally I feel that if it's good enough for the likes of Google and Amazon then it's good enough for everyone else.

 

[MyWorld]

What do you mean they don't support others?
But they openly support Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu etc and allow you to install any of them at your leisure in top of Ubuntu.

They dropped support for all those platforms ages ago and they all have to develop independently.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/02/canonical-withdraw-financial-support-from-kubuntu

Canonical will, from Kubuntu 12.10 onwards, provide backing for the KDE flavour in the same way as it does Xubuntu, Edbuntu, and Lubuntu – with infrastructure and resources rather than money.

In other words, server space and access to apt repositories. Even that is stretching it since none of the updates are even tested on said DEs. There are many discussions of broken dependencies, outdated packages since newer DE specific apps and libs do not work with Ubuntu dependancies and libs, etc.
If you frequent the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu forums you would without a doubt have come across these discussions.

Canonical officially ONLY support Ubuntu and Unity.
I know you can choose Gnome-classic as a shell on login, but they have been looking at a way to drop even that for a while now.

Amazon does not use Canonical, they use Amazon Linux AMI which is based on RHEL 5.x and parts of RHEL6. Or at least that is all I could find on Amazon and their servers.

Google does use Ubuntu:

So, what about the desktop itself? Is everyone required to use Unity, Ubuntu's popular but controversial desktop? Nope.

When asked about Unity use, Bushnell said, “Unity? Haters gonna hate. Our desktop users are all over the map when it comes to their interfaces. Some use GNOME, some use KDE, some use X-Window and X-Terms. Some want Unity because it reminds them of the Mac. We see Mac lovers moving to Unity.” There is no default Goobuntu interface.

http://www.zdnet.com/the-truth-about-goobuntu-googles-in-house-desktop-ubuntu-linux-7000003462/

But again, it do not care who uses it, the point is they are alienating themselves from the rest of the FOSS community, therefore the hate:

Another issue that came to light is a bit more daunting and damning. This came to light when I discovered an issue with OpenShot, Blender, and Ubuntu 13.04. It's a bug that apparently has been around since 12.10 and it renders the animated titles worthless. When I was on the OpenShot forums I was told the developers probably won't be doing anything with that bug as they are focusing on version 2.0. The bug is an issue with the transparent backgrounds used in the animated titles. Instead of transparency, there's a light gray background which blocks the clips underneath.

That bug? Not on Fedora, Debian, Bohdi, AVLinux (based on Debian), and a number of other distributions. Any distribution based on Ubuntu 12.10 or higher -- you've got a problem. Although this isn't one of those issues where a developer (or groups of developers) are saying, "We don't care about fixing this for Ubuntu because of how we feel toward Canonical!" But the idea that there might well be developers (such as anyone associated with Wayland) who will turn their backs on Ubuntu -- simply because of decisions made by Shuttleworth -- could cause large-scale, cascading issues that could eventually lead to the entirety of the open source community turning their backs on Ubuntu.

If there is one thing Canonical should not do, it is shun the members of a community that has helped give rise to the popularity of Ubuntu Linux. If more and more developers do this, Ubuntu will find themselves with a mass of software that will no longer function. Then what? Will they do what they did with Mir and create every application in house? We all know that will never happen. Even if Canonical wanted to do such a thing -- they'd never find the capital to make it happen.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/li...o-heal-the-rift-in-the-open-source-community/

 

[SauRoNZA]

Interfering, I never use any of those second tier distros so wasn't aware of the lack of financial support. But to be honest I never thought they had financial support in the first place and only received official approval.

Still I think that is exactly what we need in the Linux world, more commercial focus and less free ****ing around. It's the only way it will gain real traction in the end user space.

Amazon doesn't use Ubuntu to run their actual services, but have massive support for it in their workstation capacity, much like Google does with promoting it for their own Desktop use.

I'm not really arguing for server use here, rather end-user workstation support where I feel after Windows and OSX it's got the best chance of making it in the longrun for "normal" users.

And that's what Canonical is targeting with their commercial focus, the "normal" people who are the majority and have the money, not the super geeks who want everything for free.

 

[MyWorld]

I agree that Canonical gave Linux a HUGE injection since it showed up almost a decade ago, were it not for them a lot of development would have stagnated or moved at a snails pace. But lately they have started to drop the ball a bit.

It sometime seems like they do not want to support the FOSS community any more, but rather do their own thing, and that might get them in trouble in the near future.

 

[fastesthamster]

And that's what Canonical is targeting with their commercial focus, the "normal" people who are the majority and have the money, not the super geeks who want everything for free.

What's interesting when looking at the Humble Bundle sales, is that Linux users donate more on average than Windows or Mac users. I think your internal model of "linux geek = cheap" is flawed.

 

[nakedpeanut]

I was just talking to the SO. And noticed how much cash the humble bundle actually generates.

People love a good deal and i think if they were able to drop the price to $599 they would have massive uptake.

Not that the phone price is too much, it's a damn good price for the specs. I just think the barriers are a bit too big.

 

[SauRoNZA]

What's interesting when looking at the Humble Bundle sales, is that Linux users donate more on average than Windows or Mac users. I think your internal model of "linux geek = cheap" is flawed.

Well you could say that EVERYONE buying Humble Bundles are "cheap" all things being considered.

The overall spend of Linux users per person compared to OSX/Windows is significantly lower, but then it is rather difficult to quantify when all things are equal.

In a way a donation system is already a cheap alternative to a fully commercial model where everyone pays.

 

[noxibox]

Well you could say that EVERYONE buying Humble Bundles are "cheap" all things being considered.

The overall spend of Linux users per person compared to OSX/Windows is significantly lower, but then it is rather difficult to quantify when all things are equal.

In a way a donation system is already a cheap alternative to a fully commercial model where everyone pays.

In many cases people are paying far more than the content of the bundle would cost if they simply bought it elsewhere.

Further the commercial model of everyone paying is only an idealised one, because in reality those who don't want to pay simply do not do so.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Many cases does not equal most cases.

The vast majority put in the bare minimum.

 

[MyWorld]

And Windows users pirating the OS and all the apps on it? Have we figured that into the equation?

Then you realize that the figures become quite skewed since Windows users, by this comparison, are far, far more cheap than any Linux user.
I know of people who only have pirated software, from Windows, to Adobe, from GPS and mapping software to commercial POS systems.

 

[fastesthamster]

Many cases does not equal most cases.

The vast majority put in the bare minimum.

[citation needed]

I've given examples of cases where Linux users are more generous on average than Windows and Mac users. There are also open source projects that survive by selling support which Linux users must be paying for (e.g. Codeweavers, which is another project I support). Now you have two examples where Linux users aren't cheap. Where is your data to support your belief? Or is it just that "Ubuntu is free, therefore people who use it must be cheap"? If that really was the case, would the Ubuntu Edge have broken the crowdfunding records it did? Would it be sitting on $10.3m? $32m was an ambitious goal, but the fact that it won't be reached certainly isn't because Linux users are "cheap".

 

[nakedpeanut]

/put on tin foil hat

So what if.. They are using this as part of a research and marketing tool. Just a way to drum up support and do some market research without having to spend too much cash.

This approach removes a lot of risk from a business point of view.
You either hit the astronomical target and well; you have your business cases validated with a massive amount of orders or you don't but are able to easily gauge the market so you can kill it without having to risk much or see the responses as satisfactory risk to producing it anyway.

Some points that push me in that line of thought:
Indiegogo is not as successful as kickstarter for tech projects.
People will be require to part with their cash immediately because of paypal. (big barrier to funders)
Knowing the previous crowdfunding highest record was at $10.3 million.
They go and triple that as the all or nothing amount!

Knowing the barriers, do you think it is over enthusiastic, confident, silly or part of the plan?

EDIT: $32 mil / $695 = 46 044 phones they would need to sell
Yes there are many contributions already, for shipping and the cheaper funding options
Is it too much to expect to sell say 10 000 phones?
With the current figures, assuming they were to triple to make the target, they would need to sell 7500 phones. which is not too hard i'd think.