Ubuntu One

Last updated
Ubuntu One
Developer(s) Canonical Ltd.
Initial releaseMay 13, 2009;13 years ago (2009-05-13)
Written in Python [1]
Operating system Ubuntu 9.10  – 13.10
Mac OS X 10.6 and higher
Microsoft Windows
iOS
Linux
Android
Platform Launchpad
Ubuntu OS
Ubuntu Forums
Ubuntu One
Ubuntu One Music Store
Ubuntu Software Center
Available inEnglish
Type Cloud service & single sign on service
License Server-side: Proprietary [2]
Client-side: GPLv3 [3]
Website Formerly one.ubuntu.com at the Wayback Machine (archived March 28, 2014)

Ubuntu One is an OpenID-based single sign-on service operated by Canonical Ltd. to allow users to log onto many Canonical-owned Web sites. Until April 2014, Ubuntu One was also a file hosting service and music store that allowed users to store data "in the cloud".

Contents

The service enabled users to store files online and sync them between computers and mobile devices, as well as stream audio and music from cloud to mobile devices.

In April 2014, Canonical announced that the cloud storage and synchronization features would be shut down at the end of July 31 of 2014, leaving the sign-on features intact. [4]

Features

Ubuntu One had a client application that ran on Ubuntu 9.04 and later, Windows XP or newer, and Mac OS X 10.6 and higher. Other Linux distributions not running GNOME were supported through a console client. [5] The source code is available through launchpad and can easily be compiled for other Unix-like operating systems, such as FreeBSD. [6] There was an Ubuntu One music app for iOS devices. [7] A free Ubuntu One account offered 5 GB of storage.

The Ubuntu One service was similar to Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, Google Play Music, Amazon Cloud Player. Its client code was written in Python. It used Twisted for its low-level networking and Protocol Buffers for protocol description. Data was synced over a custom protocol called "storage", and stored on Amazon S3. [8]

Ubuntu One offered automatic upload of photos taken from Android mobile devices for immediate synchronization across computers; integration with Mozilla Thunderbird for contacts and with Tomboy for notes due to the access to the local CouchDB instance. [9] It also had capabilities for purchasing DRM-free music while synchronizing them automatically with an Ubuntu One Account via the Ubuntu One Music Store (in partnership with 7digital).

Ubuntu One published APIs for developers wishing to build applications with file and data synchronization or music streaming.

An Ubuntu One account gave users access to the Canonical Store, Launchpad, Ubuntu One and other Ubuntu services; an Ubuntu One account allowed users to store files within the cloud, store their contacts details within the interface, access the Ubuntu One Music Store to buy music from and activate the Ubuntu Software Center. Other sites that support OpenID authorization also had support for Ubuntu One. [10]

History

In June 2013, the Ubuntu Single Sign On account was re-branded under Ubuntu One as part of consolidating Canonical's online services under the Ubuntu One brand. Also, the announcement identified Ubuntu Pay as another service to come under the brand. Following a security breach in July 2013, Canonical put the Ubuntu Forums under the brand, meaning that Forum users now log in using Ubuntu One, rather than with the previous username-password system.

On April 2, 2014, Canonical announced shutting down of select Ubuntu One services. As of the day of announcement, it was no longer possible to purchase storage space or music. File services would be unavailable from June 1, but existing users were allowed to download their content until July 31, when all stored data would be permanently deleted. [4] [11] Canonical explained that they were not willing to make more investment in Ubuntu One, which would be required to compete with other services. Instead, their priority is making a "converged operating system for phones, tablets, desktops." [4] The company also announced plans to release the source code for the Ubuntu One server software to the public under an open-source license. The shutdown of cloud storage and synchronization services does not affect the single sign-on function of Ubuntu One, which will remain in place.

On July 31, 2014 the service was shut down and all of the users' files were deleted.

In August 2015 Canonical released the file syncing code under the GNU AGPL. Some other server parts remain to be released, with no ETA. [12] [13]

Reception

Ubuntu One has been criticized within the Ubuntu community for using proprietary server software. [14] [15]

There was no native client integration for the Kubuntu variant of the Ubuntu operating system, as of January 2013. [16] [17] Kubuntu integration was under development and had also received a grant from the Google Summer of Code 2010.

Further criticism concerned the unclear revenue share that would be granted to the community. [18] The Amarok development team announced that they would not add support for the Ubuntu One Music Store to the Amarok media player for the moment, [19] unlike the Magnatune media store, which returns 10% of the revenue produced via the interface to Amarok. [20]

Storage

Storage was out-sourced to Amazon S3. [21] Files stored in the Ubuntu One file stores were not encrypted. [22]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ubuntu</span> Linux distribution developed by Canonical

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for Internet of things devices and robots. All of the editions can run on a computer alone, or in a virtual machine. Ubuntu is a popular operating system for cloud computing, with support for OpenStack. Ubuntu's default desktop changed back from the in-house Unity to GNOME after nearly 6.5 years in 2017 upon the release of version 17.10.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amarok (software)</span> Free and open source music player

Amarok is a free and open-source music player, available for Unix-like, Windows, and macOS systems. Although Amarok is part of the KDE project, it is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canonical (company)</span> UK-based software company that maintains the Ubuntu OS

Canonical Ltd. is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects. Canonical employs staff in more than 30 countries and maintains offices in London, Austin, Boston, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo and the Isle of Man.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Launchpad (website)</span>

Launchpad is a web application and website that allows users to develop and maintain software, particularly open-source software. It is developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Live Mesh</span>

Windows Live Mesh is a discontinued free-to-use Internet-based file synchronization application by Microsoft designed to allow files and folders between two or more computers to be in sync with each other on Windows and Mac OS X computers or the Web via SkyDrive. Windows Live Mesh also enabled remote desktop access via the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SugarSync</span> Online backup service

SugarSync is a cloud service that enables active synchronization of files across computers and other devices for file backup, access, syncing, and sharing from a variety of operating systems, such as Android, iOS, Mac OS X, and Windows devices. For Linux, only a discontinued unofficial third-party client is available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SpiderOak</span>

SpiderOak is a US-based collaboration tool, online backup and file hosting service that allows users to access, synchronize and share data using a cloud-based server, offered by a company of the same name. Its first offering, its online backup service later branded "SpiderOak ONE", launched in December 2007. SpiderOak is accessible through an app for Windows, Mac and Linux computer platforms, and Android, N900 Maemo and iOS mobile platforms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wuala</span>

Wuala was a secure online file storage, file synchronization, versioning and backup service originally developed and run by Caleido Inc. It is now part of LaCie, which is in turn owned by Seagate Technology. The service stores files in data centres that are provided by Wuala in multiple European countries. An earlier version also supported distributed storage on other users' machines, however this feature has been dropped. On 17 August 2015 Wuala announced that it was discontinuing its service and that all stored data would be deleted on 15 November 2015. Wuala recommended a rival cloud storage startup, Tresorit, as an alternative to its remaining customers.

This is a comparison of online backup services.

DAViCal is a server for calendar sharing. It is an implementation of the CalDAV protocol which is designed for storing calendaring resources on a remote shared server. Although the events are stored in a SQL database the information between client and server is transferred in the iCalendar format.

This is a list of file synchronization software for which there are Wikipedia articles.

Ubuntu Single Sign On is an OpenID-based single sign-on service provided by Canonical to allow users to log into many websites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LightDM</span> Free, open-source X display manager

LightDM is a free and open-source X display manager that aims to be lightweight, fast, extensible and multi-desktop. It can use various front-ends to draw the user interface, also called Greeters. It also supports Wayland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juju (software)</span> Open source service orchestration management tool

Juju is a free and open source application modeling tool developed by Canonical Ltd. Juju is an application management system. It was built to reduce the operation overhead of software by facilitating, deploying, configuring, scaling, integrating, and performing operational tasks on public and private cloud services along with bare-metal servers and local container-based deployments.

ownCloud Free software for cloud computing

ownCloud is an open-source software product for sharing and syncing of files in distributed and federated enterprise scenarios. It allows companies and remote end-users to organize their documents on servers, computers and mobile devices and work with them collaboratively, while keeping a centrally organized and synchronized state. ownCloud supports extensions like online document editing, calendar and contact synchronization. Users can work with documents from a browser, and there are clients for a variety of operating systems as well as mobile clients for Android and iPhone.

Mir is a computer display server and, recently, a Wayland compositor for the Linux operating system that is under development by Canonical Ltd. It was planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu; however, the plan changed and Mutter was adopted as part of GNOME Shell.

Synnefo is a complete open-source cloud stack written in Python that provides Compute, Network, Image, Volume and Storage services, similar to the ones offered by AWS. Synnefo manages multiple Google Ganeti clusters at the backend that handle low-level VM operations and uses Archipelago to unify cloud storage. To boost 3rd-party compatibility, Synnefo exposes the OpenStack APIs to users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Resilio Sync</span> File synchronization software

Resilio Sync by Resilio, Inc. is a proprietary peer-to-peer file synchronization tool available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Amazon Kindle Fire and BSD. It can sync files between devices on a local network, or between remote devices over the Internet via a modified version of the BitTorrent protocol.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seafile</span> Open-source, cross-platform file-hosting software system

Seafile is an open-source, cross-platform file-hosting software system. Files are stored on a central server and can be synchronized with personal computers and mobile devices through apps. Files on the Seafile server can also be accessed directly via the server's web interface. Seafile's functionality is similar to other popular file hosting services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. The primary difference between Seafile and Dropbox/Google Drive is that Seafile is a self-hosted file sharing solution for private cloud applications. In private clouds, storage space and client connection limits are determined exclusively by the users' own infrastructure and settings rather than the terms and conditions of a cloud service provider. Additionally, organizations, whose data privacy policies bar them from using public cloud services can draw on Seafile to build a file sharing system of their own.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nextcloud</span> Free and open-source file hosting software suite

Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. Nextcloud provides functionality similar to Dropbox, Office 365 or Google Drive when used with integrated office suites Collabora Online or OnlyOffice. It can be hosted in the cloud or on-premises. It is scalable from home office software based on the low cost Raspberry Pi all the way through to full sized data centers that support millions of users. Translations in 60 languages exist for web interface and client applications.

References

  1. ↑ "What is Ubuntu One". 13 May 2009. Archived from the original on 6 March 2011.
  2. ↑ "Ubuntu One Servers in Launchpad" . Retrieved 2010-10-22. Other/Proprietary
  3. ↑ "One license notice example" . Retrieved 2010-10-22. under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
  4. 1 2 3 Silber, Jane (2014-04-02). "Shutting down Ubuntu One file services". Canonical Blog. Canonical. Retrieved 2014-04-05.
  5. ↑ "UbuntuOne Packages for Fedora | Maxiberta's Blog". Maxiberta.com.ar. Archived from the original on 2013-07-20. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
  6. ↑ "Ubuntu One Client in Launchpad". Launchpad.net. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
  7. ↑ "Ubuntu One: Downloads". Archived from the original on 2011-08-09. Retrieved 2011-10-01.
  8. ↑ "Ubuntu One Technical Details". Ubuntu.com. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  9. ↑ "Relaxed Ubuntu 9.10: CouchDB to be Integrated - Linux Magazine Online". Linux-magazine.com. 2009-10-15. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
  10. ↑ Ubuntu One. "What's this?" . Retrieved 14 January 2019.
  11. ↑ Brodkin, Jon (2014-04-02). "Ubuntu One storage and music service shut down by Canonical". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2014-04-05.
  12. ↑ "Ubuntu One file syncing code Open Sourced".
  13. ↑ "Bug #375272 "Server software is closed source" : Bugs : Ubuntu One Servers".
  14. ↑ "Bug #375272 in Ubuntu One Servers: "Server software is closed source" — Launchpad".
  15. ↑ Bradley M. Kuhn (2010-01-14). "Back Home, with Debian!" . Retrieved 2010-10-22. UbuntuOne's server side system is proprietary software with no prospects of liberation.
  16. ↑ "Launchpad bug #375145 - Ubuntu One should have a KDE client" . Retrieved 2012-01-08.
  17. ↑ "Using Ubuntu One in Kubuntu" . Retrieved 2013-10-24.
  18. ↑ Jonathan Corbet (March 2, 2010). "The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit" . Retrieved 14 January 2019.
  19. ↑ Kretschmann, Mark. "Ubuntu One Music Store integration • KDE Community Forums" . Retrieved 16 April 2010.
  20. ↑ "buckman's magnatune blog: Giving money to open source" . Retrieved 2011-12-03.
  21. ↑ "Ubuntu One/TechnicalDetails - Ubuntu Wiki".
  22. ↑ "Ubuntu One : Help : FAQs-Are my files stored on the server encrypted?" . Retrieved 16 Dec 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.