I guess I should start off with some sort of disclaimer. What you are about to read is probably useless, my opinion, not the opinions of Ubuntu and Canonical, and probably not even worth 2 cents.

Who cares? Really? All of this complaining is destructive, interruptive, and really annoying. So now that I have said my 2 cents, let me be destructive, interruptive,a nd really annoying as well as elaborate a bit.

Everyone keeps quoting the Ubuntu Philosophy. That’s great, however there is a flaw to that.

1. Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.

You have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve the software that is provided to you by Ubuntu One. Last I heard the client was open source, has that recently changed? You aren’t getting the backend to the entire thing are you? No. Have you been asked to pay a licensing fee? Besides the insanely amount of $10/month for 10GB of storage, you haven’t been asked to pay a licensing fee. Heck you haven’t even been asked to agree to a EULA!

Our philosophy is reflected in the software we produce and included in our distribution. As a result, the licensing terms of the software we distribute are measured against our philosophy, using the Ubuntu License Policy

Dean this is not a pot shot at you the least bit, as you didn’t start this or weren’t the first to quote this, however you were right up top in the Planet when I started writing this post. This doesn’t pertain to Ubuntu One either, because a) it isn’t being distributed with Ubuntu, and if they do distribute it with Ubuntu in the future, the client that is, this is perfectly valid.

I really like what Dave Morley said about voting with your feet. If you don’t like it, don’t use it, plain and simple. Also, most of the people seem to complain as well that it is a DropBox knock off, and in its current state, you are absolutely correct. But also in its current state it isn’t complete. There will be more offerings from my understanding in the future.

Now here is where I do have a problem, actually it isn’t a problem at all to me, just something I do not understand. The entry price point, it makes absolutely no sense to me. If you release something that is a direct competitor to another product out there already, why do you offer less for more? I always thought the motto should be more for less. In this day in age storage is very important, and remote storage is just as important. The price per petabyte is very important, or in this case the price per gigabyte. If I used Ubuntu One month on a paid plan, I am looking at $1 per gigabyte, if I use it for a year, I am looking at $12 per gigabyte. This is a bit much in my opinion, but I do have a bit of experience when it comes to storage and pricing. Spending the last year of my life working on a distributed storage solution, I had the opportunity to learn the market and the business quite well.

Ok, that’s it, now can we all quit complaining about it and get to work? We are wasting to many cycles, me included, talking about this until we are blue in the face. If you want to be constructive, check out the following:

• Merge-O-Matic
• REVU
• Ubuntu Bugs
• Ubuntu Wire for any dev stuff I may have missed