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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Mmh, 14 days remaining and only 27% funded, it doesn't bode well. I wonder if they'll be able to build momentum this late in the campaign.

Maybe this kind of expensive, high volume devices shows the limits of crowdfunding? Have there been similar projects crowdfunded already (similar price/target)?

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I saw that as well, its not very realistic to expect them suddenly make up the difference. Perhaps having people dedicated to spamming popular tech and related sites might get them a bump.

Specs today promised for 2014 don't mean much to me, its a seven hundred dollar bet against what other smart phone makers are doing. Considering the speed at which that segment moves its not a bet I am willing to make.

I backed this campaign, and I don't really care much about the specs. It will be good enough, and the promise of a more open mobile platform is enough to convince me of paying the premium and making the bet.

I also believe in their vision of converging different device classes in the software space, although I'm not sure they'll be the ones succeeding in it.

>promise of a more open mobile platform

In light of JBQ's quitting AOSP[1], how open is open enough? Will we be happy if we get "free check" license to use the binary blobs? Will we be happy if we can see the code but not be able to copy it? Do we require them to publish drivers and their source code in a permissive license? Many people will think it is a "shades of gray" issue. I kind of want more convenience than rms promises but on the surface it seems silly to think we can have the freedom and openness from Canonical where a bigger (financially) Google has so miserably failed. Perhaps our interests are more aligned with Canonical than with Google? Thoughts?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6174514

I've spent some time thinking about this, and for me (and a lot of other people I've talked with) the line in the sand is "enough for us to be able to build newer or versions of the userland and kernel." This does not require that we're able to modify every bit of code.

For instance, the Raspberry Pi has a binary blob of firmware that contains a lot of the code for using with the graphics hardware. While we can't modify or recompile this part, the (minimalistic) interface to this firmware is an open source kernel module. This allows you to build newer or modified kernels, and build other distributions for the RPi and still have access to the graphics acceleration. I consider this "open enough."

While Android is fairly open, there is a large part of it still that is closed source. This includes the front-ends of Google's own services (I consider back ends out of scope), binary drivers (graphics), binary firmware (radio) and binary libraries (OpenGL implementations, closely linked to graphics drivers).

The goal of Canonical's project is also to make the drivers and OpenGL part open source, but I've not seen anything about the radio bits.

This is why this is not considered "buying a new cool phone" but "supporting a new cool idea". However, I personally find the 700$ too much to put into that idea, even if the phone itself is worth something around this.

If you want to just "support a new cool idea" and don't pay that much then you can pledge the lower ones ($20, $30, $50)

The campaign started on Jul 22, we're on Aug 8 and they have until now 8.5 million raised funds.

That's pretty impressive in my opinion and meeting the deadline is hard, but it can still happen.

No, it can't. Most of that money was raised in the first five days when the hype stared. The contribution rate actually slowed down and nothing short of a miracle will change that.

http://s.4pda.to/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ubuntu-edge.png

It looks like that miracle they are expecting is for more corporate sponsors to come in and snatch up large batches.

But I agree, it's looking highly unlikely that they'll meet the goal unless the timeframe is extended.

That's very misleading, the contribution rate was always dependent on price, not on early hype. Look how quickly the increase fell off when the price went up, and then took off again when the price was dropped, in the first couple of days:

http://ubuntu-edge.info/#total

Hey, I would love to be proven wrong on this. I love the concept.

I just don't see it happening. They won't even hit the half.

If they manage (somehow) to hit their 30m goal it will have raised 9.4% of the entire 2012 total pledges on Kickstarter and the entire year pledged amount for Technology projects. So it may blow anything that Kickstarter has had out of the water. All these numbers are for Kickstarter because I couldn't find a convenient list of numbers for Indiegogo.

source: http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category

ps: There's a lack of a good verb tense for something that could happen but it is unlikely, there's no good pessimistic subjunctive future.

> ps: There's a lack of a good verb tense for something that could happen but it is unlikely, there's no good pessimistic subjunctive future.

"Were it to happen ...." ?

That's decent, it fits a little awkwardly in to the middle of sentences though. Just something I kept noticing when I was typing that. out.

It's a downward spiral. A lot of people would not invest because they know that the target amount won't be reached. I think the collection rate will slow down further.

"Maybe this kind of expensive, high volume devices shows the limits of crowdfunding?"

Maybe having a billionaire with his hand out holding a tin cup shows that people aren't such big suckers as Shuttleworth anticipated?

Most funded project on Indiegogo seems to be Scanadu Scout with $1,664,176 while Kickstarter has some watch called the Pebble with $10,266,845 and OUYA got around the same amount of pledges which the Ubuntu Edge has so far.

Looking at those projects doesn't really seem encouraging for the Edge:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/scanadu-scout-the-first-me...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-...

- They all add significant rewards (i.e., not shirts) at lower tiers (you got an ouya for $100, pebble for $110 and scanadu for $270).

- They add much lower targets (the ouya had the highest at $950 000)

- Even the pebble, most successful of the three, "only" raised $10 millions.

The Edge wants more than three times that for something that's arguably less innovative (yet another smartphone) and wants us to bet no less than $700 on it (the lower tiers are basically charity).

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