Ubuntu Edge: how many phones were really ordered - and the mistakes | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Edge: how many phones were really ordered - and the mistakes

theguardian.com

35 pointsareski30 comments

From the article:

The project didn't actually raise* any money; a total of $12.2m was pledged, but none would be charged against anyone's credit card (not even the usual few percent from a failed project) under a special arrangement with IndieGoGo.*

Not true, as far as I understand it. Certainly my bank statement showed a transaction, and a subsequent refund.

I believe the article is correct in that Canonical never saw that money - I understand Indiegogo held onto it until the refund - but it was certainly charged.

That's actually one of the things that stopped me from ordering an Edge.

I just don't have the cashflow to leave ~£500 in someone else's hands for a lengthy period of time.

Would've been happy with a deposit amount and a final bill before dispatch. But when you're paying yourself bare minimum at a startup, the funds just aren't there in my personal finances to tie up a quite significant amount for so long and at relatively short notice.

But this is misunderstanding the point of kickstarter et al - although it may feel like you are just preordering, you are not - and actually funding the development (which could go wrong, and never get anything). It's why people shouldn't be too annoyed/upset if they don't get their items first/cheapest.

The headline would suggest that everyone believed this was pre-ordering. Hence the "How many phones were ordered".

Then you cant afford the phone surely? Its not cheap, and you are living on a budget, it was pitched as a luxury item pretty much.

Afford is a strange word to use in the same context as the word luxury.

I can afford the phone, but do not have the luxury of a high disposable income. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

Depending on your definition of the word "afford." I, personally, can't afford luxury items if I suspect that my bank accounts will, within the next year or two, amount to less than the cost of that luxury item.

Ehhh, What?

Afford is a perfectly applicable word to use in the same context as luxury... In fact it is among one of the most applicable words.

Oftentimes the determining factor when purchasing a luxury item is whether it is affordable... Your personal definition of "afford" might be different then the Oxford dictionaries definitions, but then we're talking semantics.

Does Indiegogo simply block the amount or really gets and refunds back?

It was not campain aimed to make Edge. It was marketing and publicity stunt by Canonical to have some data to feed to vendors which supply them with stuff to make Ubuntu phone. It was something like prototype car to show off at exhibition, just to draw attention. They make numbers bigger because that is the main reason behind this campain. Now they have some point of reference, and they can show to suppliers that they are serious. Even if it was 15.000 Edges they know that they have audience. Besides IndieGoGo made couple of dollars on those pledged money as samstokes wrote, put couple of mils (specially not yours) in bank and get the percents, nice.

Has anyone considered a SCRUM funding model? i.e. Similar to how Patreon's used to fund ongoing deliverables from YouTube artists (among others) the team could have patrons sign up to pay a smaller amount on a fortnightly basis, with the development team announcing their goal for that sprint, then taking funding on delivery. This gives patrons the option to back out further down the project if things go off course/change, thus reducing risk in committing to a failing project, whilst allowing other patrons to sign up down the line as the project starts to look increasingly feasible. Optionally small awards could be given per pledge, whilst larger rewards (e.g. your own phone) given to those who've given a certain amount by the end of the project / the pledged amounts could be discounted from the resulting phone's price.

Apparently Richard Stallman in the comments saying that Canonical refused to make it a completetly free software platform...

I think that this is a strategic error from Canonical: a lot of people would like a truly free alternative to Android phones (with open hardware), and this could have been an opportunity to get them to support Edge. Canonical missed it IMHO.

See Mark Shuttleworth AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

The state of free graphics drivers for mobile is of course terrible, and Canonical are quite UX driven so there is a big difficulty. They could have made more of an effort with the non graphics parts, which would have helped.

I never got the impression they had actually decided what hardware to use - eg it might have been Intel not ARM, as 4G on ARM SoCs is hard to get.

> I think that this is a strategic error from Canonical: a lot of people would like a truly free alternative to Android phones (with open hardware), and this could have been an opportunity to get them to support Edge. Canonical missed it IMHO.

I think you underestimate the echo chamber effect. The number of people who care about FOSS is minuscule, and marketing the Edge to that crowd would dilute the marketing message for everyone else.

For the people who care about FOSS you wouldn't have to market that feature, just state it. Also, the people who care about FOSS are loud, and influence people who don't care about FOSS.

I think you underestimate the appealing to as many disparate influential groups as possible effect.

Yeah, that's the reason most smartphones are Android and iOS.

/sarcasm

permalink to the comment: http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/26404040

Comment quoted here for ease:

Although Ubuntu is a variant of the GNU operating system that I launched (see http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html), it has major ethical flaws: it contains software that is not free/libre (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) and it spies on the user (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.html).

The Free Software Foundation challenged the developers of the Ubuntu Edge to design it so that it would run without user-restricting nonfree software, but they rejected that goal.

Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation www.fsf.org www.gnu.org

The Ubuntu spyware incident was exactly the reason why I didn't support this project.

Me, too. I decided to wait until it came out, make an assessment on how much of it would be closed, and to what extent that could be worked around. If I could have trusted Ubuntu, I'd have been in for two or three.

He seems to be a regular commenter on the Guardian website.

Personally I think the problem was that there where no free beer rewards.

Estimations are that Jolla is going to produce a batch of 50,000 units. http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/21/jolla-closes-first-pre-sale...

So I think it's strange Canonical didn't make this happen.

It would have been nice if they had some graphs showing projects that reached their goals early.

What would have happened if Ubuntu had set the goal at 1 million $? Then most of the backers would have certainty when they backed the project since they knew it would succeed in getting funded!

Maybe this would have led to 32 million, maybe not.

There are significant fixed costs, you can't just divide the required goal by 32 to produce 1/32 of the number of phones. I'd guess that $1M wouldn't be enough to even produce one of those phones.

That is a downside yes.

The question still remains. Would more people have pledged knowing that the project would get funded?

Essentially this would be like preordering it.

But the problem is that if it reached the goal of $1M but didn't get far past it, they'd be expected to then supply the phones those people had pledged for without actually having enough money to produce them.

I've backed Kickstarters only after they've already reached their goal, just for the sake of preordering the product.

Yes, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are not meant to be storefronts and I might be a bad citizen for treating it as such, but the incentive is there. If the developers are going to treat these fundraisers as a place to sell a product, I'm going to use these fundraisers as a place to buy a product. Especially in cases where the Kickstarter product is significantly less than the price of the product when it hits retail. If you tell me I can "buy" your product for $8 on Kickstarter and get the product in the mail weeks before it's officially for sale, or I could wait longer and buy it for $20, what do you expect me to do?

Or would fewer have pledged? I'd be willing to bet there were a substantial number of people who pledged in order to convince Ubuntu that there was interest in the phone, but knowing that they wouldn't have to commit funds to it right now (at least not permanently.)

This is quite nitpicky. A worthless debate over semantics.

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