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@mrlen If light bulbs and speakers that have an IP address is something you can make continuous money with, and Ubuntu Touch isn´t, then, a company must follow the former alternative.
Mark Shuttleworth invested millions of his own money already in Ubuntu, more than a usual business owner would do, and that money wont flow forever. They tried hard to create money from the phone platform, but it did not work out, partly for the reasons he mentioned in this interview. Period.
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@mrlen said in Powers that be holding alternatives back | Conspiracy?:
In any case, I DO genuinely believe someone told Canonical to quit working in Ubuntu Touch.
You should immediately stop believing this, because it's not at all true.
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@dobey I'll stop saying it, because I know it's not well received -- but I can't stop thinking it. I'll move onto other, more important topics now.
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@mrlen It's not about whether it's well received or not. It's just simply and utterly false. You have conceived a conspiracy based on your own false assumptions about many things you have no understanding of. Businesses do not work the way you think they do, based on the many assumptions you've posted in this thread.
I was there when it happened. Everything you've said is false. A lot of people are of course unhappy with the decision, but it has nothing to do with any of the things you are imagining.
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Ok, now I realize I was completely uninvolved in any of this, but as a UT user on a Nexus 4 for well over a month and someone who made a failed Ubuntu respin in the 2010's, I feel I can settle the question in this with sufficient knowledge and explain why this conspiracy is completely wrong.
I will explain it from a complete outsider perspective. It all started with Ubuntu Netbook edition, which was the first version that had an early version of the interface we use on our devices today. Using Ubuntu with a phone was discussed, but back then, that was obviously long before the age of full Android dominance.
Then Ubuntu Touch came out and Mark discussed the issue of convergence, which back then was like science fiction. It was great, but only worked on a couple of devices. Also decisions made for the desktop environment to accomodate the move to phones ticked off a lot of users who moved to other respins or distros (ok maybe not that many but at least me). So now we're at like 2010ish.
That was the year of the Ubuntu Edge (ok it was 2014). Mark had the idea to make a state of the art Ubuntu Phone called the Ubuntu Edge which would have made your iPhone eat dirt, plus it could do convergence, and legit believed he could raise $32M to make one on Indiegogo. He was close (ok in the end he wasn't. He was like $20M off but that first week was super exciting.) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge#/
So finally, I think, I think the technical vision (which was futuristic and awesome) became overshadowed by the financial vision (huge profits as would-be future iPhone users would mock the green-text poors from their amazing, high-end convergence devices and was incredibly unrealistic for an obvious reason I will detail) and I feel like the Edge campaign was a bit of a wake-up call from reality.
It wasn't long before I think that took a toll on Mark, who from what I understand from what I've read of him is basically successful at everything he does. As someone who has occasionally failed, I completely understand how painful that can be, and so it's understandable why he walked away from the project and the Unity DE to put back Gnome. However, the reason the vision failed is kind of obvious: Ubuntu's popularity among new regular users is that you can bring computers whose technical requirements failed Windows back to life. In short, Ubuntu's popularity among regular users was bringing old computers back, while powering new devices was a much later focus of interest. Certainly, I have never been part of the $600 phone crowd. So Mark focused on Ubuntu Desktop and gave UT back to the community to work on. However, before the Installer, installing Ubuntu Touch looked a lot like making Puppy Linux run the latest Chrome. (No, no, it's not as easy as using the portable version.)
So they quietly have been working to put UT on more devices, which kept a lot of people under the radar interested. Librem came out and with the whole $599 pre-order a lot of people were like "oh we've seen this before." But then in the fall, suddenly this weird PinePhone company came out offering $100 phones with... Ubuntu Touch on it. Well, I may not be a tech person, but I do know that $100 minus $10 for UBports equals A REALLY CHEAP PHONE and that's the language I speak. Having raged quietly against the monster Android's become, I became obsessed with finding how these Pinephone guys did it. What's the cheap tech, I wanted to know. I wanted to know. (Also they sold out of the phones.) So I think I duckduckgo'd "low cost ubuntu touch" or something and found the page with the Nexus 4. And there was an easy installer. And bless that guy who was selling a Nexus 4 with UT on it for $80 (totally fair if you add in the labor cost) but as someone who got Puppy Linux to run the latest Chrome, that installer looked really easy, so I bought a Nexus 4 for $35 and a week for delivery and an hour later had UT running on it.
So it's not that there was a conspiracy, it's that UT only became massively accessible a few months ago and everyone's like "how this phone work so great" when in fact it's the product of years of work that no one noticed and it's only shining now.
I believe this authoritatively settles the question. I have spoken.
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@totalrando said in Powers that be holding alternatives back | Conspiracy?:
So now we're at like 2010ish.
Nope. That was 2012/2013 timeframe when first version of Ubuntu for devices was public.
Between the Netbook remix and Ubuntu for devices (and Ubuntu for Android, which never actually happened), was just primary focus of developing the Unity environment (and services like file sync and music streaming, through Ubuntu One).
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@dobey I wasn't exact on time. My memory is far from perfect on events. But I think I'm right and that's what matters.
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@totalrando You're a little bit off. There was a heck of a lot done between the Ubuntu Edge campaign, and Canonical dropping development of Unity and Ubuntu for devices. Also, Ubuntu Edge would not have resulted in the same Ubuntu Touch that we have today, if it had been successful, as the goal there was to have an Android phone with a version of Ubuntu optimized for running on the phone when plugged into external display, more like Samsung DeX or how MaruOS works.
Things that led to the decision are a lot more complex than the simplified timeline presented. It's not worth it to go too deeply into things here though, but suffice to say the OP's conspiracy theorizing is way off base. Google and Apple both have enough money that if they wanted to stop "alternatives" they could have simply purchased Canonical in whole, and dismantled all the projects, including Ubuntu (because why would Apple want an alternative to macOS). But obviously none of that ever happened. It's akin to placing the same theory as the reason for why Blackberry or Windows Mobile also failed. Just nonsense.
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@dobey I feel like what's being lost in all this is that I got Ubuntu Touch running on a Nexus 4 in no time flat with this easy installer you all created, and that's really the most important thing.
But I do agree this theory is hilariously wrong.
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And with that I think we can safely end the discussion there.
