6 ms·

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 othe

by pavs 13y ago

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.

wodenokoto 13y ago
840 usd for an off-contract high-end smartphone isn't unreasonable. A 64gb iPhone 5 off-contract is more expensive, and that's half the space. So yes, you can compare it to current devices, and it sounds like it is beating them.
- scholia 13y ago
  Yes, but the iPhone 5 is sold at Apple's rapacious profit margins, and it has a _much_ lower spec than the Edge. Edge has to be relatively expensive because costs are amortized over 40,000 units rather than 40,000,000.
  - stephencanon 13y ago
    > it has a _much_ lower spec than the Edge. A shipping device always beats an imaginary device on specs. It’ll be interesting to compare specs if and when the Edge actually ships. Until then ...
    - scholia 13y ago
      True, but Apple ships phones and tablets with the lowest specs it can get away with, as this maximizes profits. Edge is deliberately over-specced.
      - stephencanon 13y ago
        It’s easy to over-spec something that doesn’t exist. Let’s wait and see what they ship.
        scholia 13y ago
        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).
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  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.
  - zanny 13y ago
    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.
DannyBee 13y ago
"made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community." After what i've seen, god I hope this changes. I can't really say too much more, sadly, but I imagine over time people will get a taste of how Canonical really operates (Note: I'm sure the engineers are wonderful, and I suspect they have no idea what the business/etc side is doing) The most I can say is that their public "we love open source face" is not exactly the one they always show in private.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  Is there anything specific you can point to that would explain what you mean here? Or are you referring to thing such as the Mir, Unity, etc. controveries?
  - sho_hn 13y ago
    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.
thezilch 13y ago
> not meant for you [...] is for you 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.
sho_hn 13y ago
> 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.
- oblique63 13y ago
  > 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...
  - ansimionescu 13y ago
    I'm going to act the fool a bit here and ask why is Apple not a "good" company? What's your definition of that and can you give some examples?
Zigurd 13y ago
> 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?
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  The Edge is designed to be used as a desktop as well. It also has a true Linux terminal and runs Ubuntu. Quite different than other phones.
  - ori_b 13y ago
    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 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.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      Having Linux drivers for the hardware they choose is probably key rather than just reflashing existing phones.

by pavs 13y ago

wodenokoto 13y ago

840 usd for an off-contract high-end smartphone isn't unreasonable. A 64gb iPhone 5 off-contract is more expensive, and that's half the space. So yes, you can compare it to current devices, and it sounds like it is beating them.

scholia 13y ago
Yes, but the iPhone 5 is sold at Apple's rapacious profit margins, and it has a _much_ lower spec than the Edge. Edge has to be relatively expensive because costs are amortized over 40,000 units rather than 40,000,000.
- stephencanon 13y ago
  > it has a _much_ lower spec than the Edge. A shipping device always beats an imaginary device on specs. It’ll be interesting to compare specs if and when the Edge actually ships. Until then ...
  - scholia 13y ago
    True, but Apple ships phones and tablets with the lowest specs it can get away with, as this maximizes profits. Edge is deliberately over-specced.
    - stephencanon 13y ago
      It’s easy to over-spec something that doesn’t exist. Let’s wait and see what they ship.
      - scholia 13y ago
        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).
georgemcbay 13y ago
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.
- zanny 13y ago
  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.

DannyBee 13y ago

"made by a company that is loved by most of Open Source and Linux community." After what i've seen, god I hope this changes. I can't really say too much more, sadly, but I imagine over time people will get a taste of how Canonical really operates (Note: I'm sure the engineers are wonderful, and I suspect they have no idea what the business/etc side is doing) The most I can say is that their public "we love open source face" is not exactly the one they always show in private.

chimeracoder 13y ago
Is there anything specific you can point to that would explain what you mean here? Or are you referring to thing such as the Mir, Unity, etc. controveries?
- sho_hn 13y ago
  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.

thezilch 13y ago

> not meant for you [...] is for you 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.

sho_hn 13y ago

> 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.

oblique63 13y ago
> 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...
- ansimionescu 13y ago
  I'm going to act the fool a bit here and ask why is Apple not a "good" company? What's your definition of that and can you give some examples?

Zigurd 13y ago

> 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?

oscilloscope 13y ago
The Edge is designed to be used as a desktop as well. It also has a true Linux terminal and runs Ubuntu. Quite different than other phones.
- ori_b 13y ago
  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 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.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Having Linux drivers for the hardware they choose is probably key rather than just reflashing existing phones.