Canonical Shuts Down Ubuntu One Cloud Storage Service
Ubuntu One will close on 31 July as Canonical pulls out of free cloud storage wars
Canonical is to shut down its Ubuntu One cloud storage service as it seeks to devote more of its resources to the ongoing development of the Ubuntu operating system, which it is hoped will make a major impact on smartphones and tablets in the near future.
As of today, it is no longer possible to purchase storage or music from the Ubuntu One store, and it will no longer be included in future releases of Ubuntu, while its smartphone applications will be updated to reflect the change.
The service will no longer be usable from 1 June, and content will be deleted on 31 July. Canonical says those with remaining annual subscriptions will be refunded, dating back to today, and it will be in contact to tell them how they can download their content before the deadline.
Ubuntu One cloud storage
In a blog post, the organisation said that part of Ubuntu’s role as an open platform is to promote third party services, and that with the increasing amount of free storage provided by competitors such as Dropbox, Box and Google Drive, it was simply unfeasible for Ubuntu One to continue to compete.
“The free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage,” said Canonical. “If we offer a service, we want it to compete on a global scale, and for Ubuntu One to continue to do that would require more investment than we are willing to make.
“We choose instead to invest in making the absolute best, open platform and to highlight the best of our partners’ services and content.”
However despite the demise of the service, Canonical is keen to see the project continue as a community project and will release the source code.
“We continue to believe in the Ubuntu One file services, the quality of the code, and the user experience, so will release the code as open source software to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform,” it added.
Canonical recently announced its first two smartphone manufacturing partners following the failure to secure its funding target for the Ubuntu Edge and it is expected that the handsets will be released later this year. It is aimed at Android users wanting an alternative platform, with CEO Mark Shuttleworth admitting that Ubuntu Mobile is probably not going to be appeal to iPhone users.
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