Ubuntu Edge At $11M With Less Than Three Days Left

[jalyst]

No, I just questioned the idea that it's "hella popular".

Maybe I just have different ideas of what that term means.

Yeah well, it kinda depends on the context in which it was meant, doesn't it...
The long held notion of a complete Linux/FOSS mobile stock would be "hella popular" amongst enthusiasts who've seen it treated as little more than a concept by large co's over 8yrs+.
Or seen it executed poorly by much smaller organisations, with very limited resources.

[johnc]

A objective person wouldn't parrot the well-worn mantra that:
"The worldwide market's fulls, there's no way for a tiny start-up to carve out a small niche & go from there."
But that's not what you were thinking right, nah, not at all...

No, I just questioned the idea that it's "hella popular".

Maybe I just have different ideas of what that term means.

[jalyst]

Because I choose to look at things objectively.

A objective person wouldn't parrot the well-worn mantra that:
"The worldwide market's fulls, there's no way for a tiny start-up to carve out a small niche & go from there."
But that's not what you were thinking right, nah, not at all...

[johnc]

Why would you compare a start-up that has no preexisting user-base* to far larger co's that have estb. user-bases? Apples & Oranges.
50k's** very +ve news for a tiny start-up of approx. 100 employes who's seeking to unlock more droplets of that pledged 250million in funding.
Even if they unlocked none of it (unlikely but possible), 50k's more than enough to keep a co. that size going well into the foreseeable future.
And then there's the talk of them committing to 1x final round of pre-orders for 2013...


*aside from users from maemo/meego & other loosely related platforms, but that's been a shrinking demographic for ages & never was big/loved from the outset
**which we don't know for sure is accurate, but they have strongly hinted it's around that amt

Because I choose to look at things objectively.

[jalyst]

I'm not sure that selling 50k phones should be put in the category of "hella popular".

BlackBerry probably sold that many Z10 phones in its first day, and the Z10 is decidedly not "hella popular".

This kinda comes off as the usual Linux geek delusions of grandeur that seem so common.

Why would you compare a start-up that has no preexisting user-base* to far larger co's that have estb. user-bases? Apples & Oranges.
50k's** very +ve news for a tiny start-up of approx. 100 employes who's seeking to unlock more droplets of that pledged 250million in funding.
Even if they unlocked none of it (unlikely but possible), 50k's more than enough to keep a co. that size going well into the foreseeable future.
And then there's the talk of them committing to 1x final round of pre-orders for 2013...


*aside from users from maemo/meego & other loosely related platforms, but that's been a shrinking demographic for ages & never was big/loved from the outset
**which we don't know for sure is accurate, but they have strongly hinted it's around that amt

[TheBlackCat]

Time is up. No extension was made. The crowdfunding campaign is over.

[dee.]

Link?

I can give you several.

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Careers/Linux-Developers-in-High-Demand-628605/

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-its-where-the-jobs-are/10358

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/15/linux_salary_survey/

Etc. You get the picture.

This is because Notch goes in there and drops a million or so for the Linux side. It kinda skews the average big-time.

Sure, whatever you say... in the latest weekly bundle the highest amount donated was $1500, and the Linux average is still larger than win/mac. Or if we look at the latest indie bundle (#8), Linux users' average was 50% higher than the others, this Notch person only paid $5000, not a million. We can also look at the totals - the total amount paid in HIB8 is $2M, and Linux users are responsible for ~10% of that, or $200k, that means that the single $5k payment is only 2.5% of the total donated by Linux users - not exactly something that would "sway" the average all that much.

[LinuxGamer]

I'm talking about the whole price up and downs.

That was Redundant

[johnc]

Do you see how good job prospects are for Linux experts? Companies are fighting tooth and nail to throw money at anyone who knows their Linux.

Link?

Just look at the Humble Bundle statistics, Linux users invariably pay more on average than either windows or mac users.

This is because Notch goes in there and drops a million or so for the Linux side. It kinda skews the average big-time.

[dee.]

There is no "in between" when it comes to the campaign. It either succeeds or fails. Yes or no. You asserted that it failed because some proportion of users did not support it because of Mir. That position implies that it would have succeeded if it used Wayland. On the other hand, if that is not your position, then you must conclude that the campaign would have failed even if they used Wayland, and hence the "negative contribution" of Mir to the campaign was negligible, as the campaign would have failed anyway due to other reasons.

Nopes - Mir is one reason, but there are other bad decisions made by Canonical that managed to alienate the community, which could potentially have backed this up. It's like, everyone has a fault tolerance, and when you pile on the damage, eventually comes the point when an individual's fault tolerance is exceeded. First came some only mildly shitty stuff, mismanagement of Unity/Upstart/PulseAudio, some people's fault tolerance was exceeded but not so many.

Then we got the amazon adware, later named "SmartScopes" which was handled spectacularly badly, it's seriously like they wanted to piss off people - just make it opt-in ffs, no one could have complained too much that way, and the revenue would probably have been much the same, but the perception would have been loads better. At this point, more people's fault tolerance was exceeded - including mine, I switched to another distro at this point.

And THEN, just when we thought Canonical couldn't possibly do anything stupider, they revealed Mir. Not only that, but they mismanaged the whole thing horribly, by spreading lies and FUD about Wayland - thus losing any and all possible higher-road-advantages in any future debate, because it meant that everyone could then always honestly say that it was Canonical who started the mudslinging. Not only is Mir technically unnecessary, divisive, harmful to the ecosystem et c. but it also showed the world that you really, really can't trust anything Shuttleworth says - he may promise one thing and a week later change his mind if he happens to consider it profitable. Again, many more people's fault tolerance was exceeded. Many more people lost their trust in Canonical.

In between all those there are some smaller blunders, such as the whole "skunkworks" deal (and again, they had to badmouth Fedora/Red Hat in the process, just not classy), the suspicious closing of the #1 bug, but these were all much smaller things in the grand scale of things... however, even small things add up when you pile them on. The stupidest part is that all of these blunders were avoidable. They could very easily have been avoided.

Basically I take issue with the assumptions that 50000 Linux users would preorder a phone that is twice the price of a Nexus 4, but two thirds decided not to because of Mir.

Hell yes they would. Linux enthusiasts have cash to spare. Do you see how good job prospects are for Linux experts? Companies are fighting tooth and nail to throw money at anyone who knows their Linux. Even less-expert Linux users are often not exactly poor. Just look at the Humble Bundle statistics, Linux users invariably pay more on average than either windows or mac users. It's not unrealistic at all to see 50k Linux users paying $600-700 for a phone.

"Among those Linux enthusiast, the proportion who base their choice of phone on the Mir debacle is not negligible anymore." - there is no evidence that this statement is true. It is much more likely that people were put off by the high price and unknown hardware and unknown future delivery date. But if you honestly do not believe that, then I encourage you to start your own campaign for a Manjaro/Mint phone. Nobody is forcing you to support Ubuntu.

A Mint phone would be silly, Mint is a desktop OS and has no interest in anything mobile. They choose to focus in one type of device (desktop/laptop computer) and do it well, without having to compromise desktop usability to accommodate for phablet users. I'm not sure about Manjaro, but I suspect similar concerns would apply there as well.

Me starting a crowdsourcing campaign would also be kind of silly - partly because I live in Finland, where we have some very, very outdated fundraising laws, that render most types of crowdfunding campaigns illegal - but mostly, because I don't really have the resources, contacts or knowledge to put together a phone even if I had the money to do so. It's better to leave it to someone who actually has a chance of accomplishing it. However if I were to do it, I wouldn't use any desktop Linux distro, I'd use something Mer-based, possibly running Plasma Active or Nemo, on top of Wayland - or possibly Tizen, except with all the Samsung's Flora-licensed apps swapped out for something less patent-trappy.