@libremax said in Where does Ubuntu Touch come from? And why clarify it?:
With the current communication about Ubuntu Touch (which doesn't make explicit the extent of the resources involved in building it), the newcomer may believe that it's something cooked up by a dozen or so guys and therefore has no chance of getting anywhere near the competitors.
The reason I use the word 'unhelpful' is because mentioning all the upstream components and the development that goes into those, does not affect in the least the viability of this project in particular. All these upstream components will continue to be produced with or without UT, because they are not produced specifically for UT. They are widely used in other Linux distro's.
UT is based on Ubuntu, so it is heavily dependent on software libraries that are packaged by Canonical and the Ubuntu Community. Yet Canonical no longer develops UT. So all the bits that make UT its own thing are now maintained, developed and updated by the UBports community.
Let us compare the situation to brand X car factory. They are dependent on suppliers and manufacturers for many of the parts for their car, so they source those from well established suppliers that are also used by every other car manufacturing company. There will be some custom parts that are produced by the brand X car factory themselves. If brand X is a small player in the automotive industry, then their supply chain is of course very important, but not the weakest link in the process of producing their cars.
To boost their appeal to investors they could mention all the effort that goes into the components in their supply chain, as if all these efforts were expended directly to produce brand X. While this would give a more complete picture of the whole manufacturing process, it would also be misleading, in a sense, because all the upstream components would be manufactured anyway, and the effort expended there would in no way make brand X more viable and future proof.
Their own smaller production and assembly capacity would be what investors would need to factor in and keep an eye on, and that is where brand x company would need to improve to be perceived as more viable.
