Ubuntu Edge funding level over time
movebits.net
movebits.net
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.
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.
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...
Over the years the list has become much too large for me to even remember it all personally, but some concrete examples of this off the top of my head would be:
A) how the company is structured and how it views its employees [1],
B) general overly intense secrecy (read: proprietary mindset) everywhere
C) rejecting apps without explanation and creating their own versions [2]
D) inconsistent app review process [3]
E) refusal to give to charity during the entirety of steve jobs’ run
F) patent abuse [4]
G) needless limits on products you supposedly "own" (e.g. ipad syncing being limited to 1 computer)
H) tracking users' locations without their knowledge/consent [5]
I) and most recently, the unusually long silence and delay after having a security breach in their developer portal (which I was a member of for some past work, believe it or not)
[There’s also the whole labor situation in china, but I don’t believe apple’s uniquely at fault there]
This is all fairly consistent behaviour, and it exhibits ‘personality’ traits that mirror those of an ultra-proprietary narcissist (read: steve jobs). None of this should be earth shattering to anybody, it’s always been out there in plain view. The only thing one could really disagree with is in how to react to it. Most people don’t care as they don’t see it affecting them, and that’s cool. But I do see how it can affect me, as it has already bitten me multiple times in the past, so I’m not neutral to it anymore. And I have a feeling that a lot of the people that are pro-linux/ubuntu/OSS have similar sentiments.
Don't get me wrong though, from the user’s perspective Apple does the whole customer satisfaction facade amazingly well (and they deserve credit for it), but that's not really an ethical thing when it's so obviously in their best economic interest to do that kind of stuff anyway (which is why I think more companies should follow it). And by "that kind of stuff", I mean those stories you always hear about people taking in their totally-burnt-to-a-crisp 9yr old macbooks into a genius bar, and Apple 'super generously' gives them a brand new fully-upgraded macbook pro with a free iphone to compensate, no questions asked. Sure that's a bit of an exaggerated scenario, but you can see how that would look amazing from the consumer perspective. The issue is that it’s purely a tactic to keep you loyal and faithful to the [proprietary] Apple brand. There was a study somewhere about hotel guests being significantly more loyal and likely to return to the same hotel chain after they've had a bad experience that was handled well by the hotel they were staying in -- same deal here. Apple had the marketing brilliance to intentionally craft that notorious cult-following mentality in its fans.
On it's own, that really isn't all that negative though. The problem is, that Apple is clearly (IMO) using it to push a dubious proprietary agenda that goes against almost everything OSS stands for[6], thus amplifying the influence of their questionable views exponentially. That's why something as benign as not having removable batteries on their devices is a lot more worrisome coming from Apple (if you're invested in their ecosystem). That design choice carries no ethical significance on it's own, but if the actor implementing it has a history of dubious motives, you better believe the significance of the move is no longer null, because it is but a vehicle to convey their greater intentions. This Edge phone for example doesn't look to have a removable battery either, but Canonical is not generally known for being closed about things, so such a design decision wouldn't worry me too much about investing in their platform.
The important thing to realize is that when you vote with your wallet, you're voting on more than just 'features', and these other less-visible aspects can and will affect you at some point.
I’m sure this rant is gonna get nit-picked and analyzed to hell, possibly missing the forest for the trees and all that, but it is a large reason why I don’t find Canonical to be a bad option to support -- and that’s really the main issue here.
[1] The book ‘Inside Apple’ is a really good read if you’re interested to know what it’s like in there: http://amzn.com/B00C2IFS3W
[2] Two examples here: https://medium.com/wwdc-round-up/253aed27a455 and http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+Accused+of+Ripping+Off+Develo...
[3] http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/17/ikamasutra-a-tale-of-sex-lo...
[4] http://gizmodo.com/5950690/apples-latest-slide+to+unlock-pat...
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-trac...
[6] I’m aware that they do have lots of OSS projects of their own, www.apple.com/opensource/ is always the first thing that’s pointed out to me when I go on an anti-apple rant. My point is that the company’s overall intentions aren’t aligned with that of the FLOSS community, and that those dubious intentions can and will bite a large segment of consumers in the ass at some point.
There's other stuff too, but those are the main reasons I don't buy Apple devices.
Basically they're building their own X replacement even though there is one in the works (Wayland) that they admit fits their needs (or could if they worked on Wayland), simply so they can have control over it. They also admit that they aren't going to bother to make it work for anyone but them, nor are they going to worry about a stable API for it (because in their minds it's only used internally, they don't care about external people who are trying to build compliance with it).
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.
Or are you referring to thing such as the Mir, Unity, etc. controveries?
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.
And personally I don't think a CLA makes sense for the specific code in question, which is purposefully designed as an interoperability solution and so implicitly multi-stakeholder.
These views are not simply restricted to trademark issues.
So yes, you can compare it to current devices, and it sounds like it is beating them.
Edge has to be relatively expensive because costs are amortized over 40,000 units rather than 40,000,000.
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 ...
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).
> not meant for you [...] is for you
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?
It also has a true Linux terminal and runs Ubuntu.
Quite different than other phones.
It's probably even doable to make it run on the Android kernel. See, for example, Hellaphone (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.
For example, as I write this, the campaign must raise an additional $28.5 million over the next 30 days, equal to under $40,000/hour or around $660/minute. So right now it would be helpful to see if the total is growing by at least $660/minute.
If you look on the curve, you can see that at $3.2 million, the curve kind of flat lines, or at least levels out a bit. This is when they ran out of the 5,000 phones they were offering at $600.
Perhaps after work hours funding will increase in pace again.
pretty deceptive if you ask me.
they did not plan their kickstarter project carefully. they need to have more rewards in the lower tier and upper tier: t-shirts, stickers, custom color on the phone, extra customization, extra ram, extra cpu etc.
Still a great kickstarter - if they raise the amount = they can show manufacturers that there is demand for ubuntu. if the don't, they still gain quite a bit of awareness of the ubuntu mobile OS.
Personally, even the $600 watermark is too high. Perhaps I and my colleagues are not the right market, but either
* we've been fooled by prices on Google's Nexus devices
* the extra power doesn't justify the cost or isn't necessary for our needs
* we might as well get Lenovos -- half our guys have a history of dropping their phones or otherwise damaging their phone
At the end of the day, I connect to numerous remote hosts to get work done, which negates the purpose if I just need a shell and terminal multiplex and browser to run on my localhost. I'm not going to want to run my RDB, search DB, KV store, cache store, messaging bus, etc from that phone. The specs are nice, for a phone, but it's not a workstation.
I don't think so. This target for this crowdfunding project is an order of magnitude larger than the infamous Pebble watch.
I'm not sure we can apply the same rules. On one hand I think it will be even harder to reach the goal. But on the other hand I think the sheer audacity and scope might have some unexpected benefits.
Nonetheless, I'd say in the end we'll consider it a successful fundraising campaign. Even if the goal isn't met and the phone never gets created what's happened so far proves that there's an opportunity for Ubuntu to find a niche that's underserved with their vision of convergence.
No matter how it ends, this is going to be a really interesting experiment for the marketing guys at Canonical and for crowdfunding in general.
But at the very least they've got some price validation. Seems like reasonably robust data for a highly visible campaign at both $600 and $820 price points that should give at least moderately good data on the price-demand curve.
I'm a little surprised this came so quickly on the second day but I guess the earlier it gets to a high value the better it is for visibility.
They see the same metrics that we do and can use it as a gauge on variable pricing to maximize the potential buy-in.
http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/trends-in-pricing-and-durati...
Based on the %time vs %backing chart, the second day usually secures around the same amount of funding as the first day. However in the case of the Ubuntu Edge, it received above average percentage backing on the first day, but has already hit the trough.
If your goal for something like this is PR, you want a big first-day number you can give press to try and gin up a second round of stories about the campaign. So it can be worth it to potentially lose a little on those sales if by doing so you can get more of them into that first-day figure.
Remember, Mark specifically says that most manufacturers won't take you seriously unless you order 100,000 units. At $600 per phone, that's only 53k units (the volumes look worse at $830 per phone). They can't actually manufacture the phone as described for $32M.
So, this is, IMHO, a publicity stunt intended to get carriers interested in Ubuntu phone, and it probably was quite successful.
http://hup.hu/cikkek/20130723/indiegogo_kampanyt_inditott_a_...
Rough translation of the first sentence ("Ennek az akciónak elsősorban az a célja, hogy az Ubuntu híre még jobban eljusson az átlagemberekhez."):
The aim of this move is to raise awareness about Ubuntu among average users.
I would wager that they can't even buy RAM directly from Samsung without an order over 100k units.
So yeah, maybe $600 per phone is high, but maybe not. They're talking about a serious bill of materials, and although they're economizing on the CMOS and the LCD for the screen, I don't think that will reduce the cost much. The sapphire screen and the single-cut shell are both significant cost structures.
It's fun to argue about unknowable things, but given that (I assume) neither of us works for Canonical, I think the answer is probably that you're right. It would be hard for that phone to cost $600, but it won't be cheap.
I looked at it, was interested but not sure. Now the $600 is sold out, I feel lees likely to buy one, even though that is partly irrational (I should just evaluate whether it is worth $830 to me, not be upset I missed out on the cheaper one).
They should have kept it at $600 and increased the total needed for the project.
Some quick calculations:
($3476017 - $3180762) / 12 hours = $24605 / hour
$3180762 + $24605 / hour * (30 days * 24 hours / day) = $20,896,062
If you can do better, please share :P Unfortunately, I just don't have the time.
Besides, the only conclusion that can be drawn at this time is that this is going to be a one of the largest kickstarter-style funding efforts ever.
The problem with your original calculation, is you're assuming the rate is constant, which it may be, roughly, for day 3 through day 27, however in these campaigns there's always an uptick right before the deadline. Really, it's that uptick that you want to estimate, based on previous campaigns.
I don't think kickstarter or indigogo release this kind of data though, unfortunately.
This is the data from the largest kickstarter "Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android":
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-wa...
If you notice, the earliest part of the campaign has nearly the highest RoC. Towards the middle, it kind of flattens out. And, as you mentioned, towards the end (the uptick) the RoC resembles that of the beginning of the campaign.
If everything remained constant for the next 27 days, that "uptick" would have to be >$10 million dollars on that last 3 days.
Still, they will beat the largest kickstarter campaign ($10 million).
http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/shortening-the-maximum-proje...
And then there are press events most likely planned that could accelerate the buying. Or another event that could slow buying.
$/Sec 26.7404
32M on 8/4/2013 21:40:03
I suspect the profit margin on the $600 price was too small, hence the small number offered.
He sells this to us the same way that wallets and pens are sold on Kickstarter. If he can get 32 million with no more than this, I am impressed.
PS: The project might be very realistic, but how can we know? For example, Pebble missed some certification that screwed German backers since customs stopped the watches. There are a million small things that can go wrong - how well prepared is Ubuntu to deal with those?
Double Fine: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-advent...
Pebble: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-wa...
OUYA: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-vid...
$20 - access to discussions.
$40 - private beta to ubuntu convergence
$50 - ubuntu edge t shirt, private beta to ubuntu convergence
$60 - ubuntu phone dock, private beta to ubuntu convergence
$90 - ubuntu dock, t shirt and private beta to ubuntu convergence
$650 - early bird: ubuntu edge (add $30 for dock)
$700 - ubuntu edge
$750 - early bird: ubuntu edge + 1gb extra ram / extra storage
$800 - ubuntu edge + 2gb extra ram / extra storage
$850 - early bird: ubuntu edge + 1gb extra ram / extra storage
$900 - ubuntu edge + 2gb extra ram / extra storage
$1200 - ubuntu edge + 2gb extra ram / extra storage plus custom limited edition orange casing + t shirt
$20,000 - air ticket to london for a private tour around the office where we will share the making of ubuntu edge and receive your ubuntu edge first
funding rate of time
change
$3,417,771 0.00170 10:00:01
$3,423,612 0.00170 10:15:01
$3,430,588 0.00203 10:30:02
$3,443,738 0.00383 10:45:01
$3,449,423 0.00165 11:00:01
$3,455,749 0.00183 11:15:02
$3,466,419 0.00308 11:30:01
$3,474,076 0.00220 11:45:02
noon posting today ~ slight uptick
in rate of change of funding level (see slight
change end of graph)
$3,476,017 0.00055 12:00:01
$3,483,942 0.00227 12:15:01
$3,494,038 0.00289 12:30:02
$3,512,621 0.00531 12:45:01
$3,517,943 0.00151 13:00:01
$3,525,984 0.00228 13:15:02
$3,531,110 0.00145 13:30:01
$3,545,968 0.00420 13:45:01
$3,550,419 0.00125 14:00:02Was there a baseline to begin with?