And a correction I never say UbuntuOne was written in mono. I said that Ifolder will most likely be important part of the larger UbuntuOne portfolio of services. You’ll note that Canonical is already looking at adapting F-spot(written in mono) to support UbuntuOne..its a sprint topic at UDS. Mono as a barrier to adoption is quite low. Nothing really competes with F-spot as a GNOME desktop application currently.

If the Ubuntu One storage protocol is actually useful iFolder will most likely gain support for it..though Canonical might not be the one doing that integration work as it might not benefit them in the short term to have an open service implementation walking around.

If people are unwilling to use iFolder or F-spot due to mono, then someone will port them to another language. All of this work is just a matter of time and desire. How long was tomboy around before someone rewrote it in C as gnote? Several years.

I give it about a year before we start to see alternative back-end UbuntuOne service offerings like iFolder integration being available for wide use. That may happen sooner if Canonical pushes desktop client support for the storage protocal into the upstream GNOME desktop as new core feature in such a way that desktop users can select which service provider to use. Once there is a widely available service provider agnostic client configuration, there will be more interest in developing different server backends which leverage the storage protocal.

If I were you I’d also watch to see how the Conduit project reacts to the existance of UbuntuOne. Conduit may gain support as an alternative client interface to the U1 storage protocal.

The storage protocal is actually far more interesting than the backend service code itself. It would be a real win if the different service providers like Dropbox, Spideroak and Jungledisk worked with Canonical to support a standard, extensible network API for storage services. The U1 storage protocal could be that sort of API..but Canonical would need to champion it as a Freedesktop specification and start the conversation with GNOME and KDE to drive support of the API into core elements of the desktop frameworks. The open/closed service backends and open/closed application support would then each develop independently at a natural pace based on conformance with the standard protocal.

-jef

If Canonical wants to offer this service and people do not mind what license its software runs, it’s ok with me.

I use gmail and other google services, so I am not complaining… What I am stating here is that there’s an option, iFolder, and that option is based in mono. I do not mind since mono is FLOSS, but other people probably will because of the Novell deal with Microsoft about cooperation, the weird license given to moonlight and the like.

So my conclusion: the most the Ubuntu community talks about iFolder, the most likely it is that someone will package it for Ubuntu.

My goal is to get that done and thus resolve this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/87122

Then I can happily choose to use iFolder or not, while other people go around discussing the mono issue and making blog wars about this and that. I am not one of them

Python rulez!

The problem here is that iFolder is the only option and it is mono based. A lot of people are going to react to the fact of having mono on their servers.

But again I am proposing this for Universe, not Main, so…

This whole thing was started by a comment done by Jef in my previous post about iFolder that mentioned Ubuntu One being mono based.

It was wrong, but at the time almost nobody knew anything about Ubuntu One, and still it does not change my point.

This post is a critic and a social experiment as I stated above.

This really is just an experiment. And yes I am making a controversial statement just in order to get this discussion rolling from a different perspective.

Now, if iFolder is the only viable option and it is all mono, what do we do? Is mono a trap, as Java used to be?

So, if we were to create a Free Software compatible server side based in iFolder, some people would start arguing about the use of mono, even if its purpose is to actually give a real FLOSS alternative to closed and propietary “cloud” solutions. Think beyond UbuntuOne: Box.net, DropBox and the like… They are all the same really in this context.

My post is trying to raise awareness about the importance of a free cloud, of the AGPL, of Free Software being everywhere without traps of any kind.

I am not discussing the trademark issue, and I do not have a problem with Canonical experimenting with several products and business models. I am not the person to try to stop anyone, what I care about is Software Freedom!

To finalize: Do we have a cloud option that is viable in the Free Software world? I do not know of any option besides iFolder… And it is all mono, mono, mono!

Which, I personally, don’t mind.

But the fact is the server *is* closed, so If you want a self hosted solution, the three options ( a) A self hosted solution provided by Canonical, b) Reverse engineering of the server code to implement it yourself or c) Wait if Canonical open source the code as It did with Launchpad) apply fully.

Sorry