ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rodney Dawes <rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2016-04-04 at 09:12 +0100, Alan Bell wrote:
> 
> On 02/04/16 17:25, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > 
> > Not everyone wants to maintain their own server.
> but some people do! The phone project seems to be very very focussed
> on 
> not taking any advantage of the fact that users might run Ubuntu 
> desktops and servers and maybe a bunch of phones.

But the phone image is still Ubuntu. There's nothing stopping anyone
from contributing to make parts of this easier by default, or from
building their own custom images with their own sync software, if
needed.

Is anyone even doing the work necessary to get a solution for ownCloud
enabled by default on the image?

> >   The part of ownCloud
> > which is problematic as a general solution is the "own" part.
> > Google,
> > Dropbox, iCloud, etc… do not provide compatibility with owncloud,
> > so
> > while it theoretically allows some of us to have some level of
> > sync, it
> > doesn't solve all the problems, and doesn't enable things for all.
> but it does enable things for people who buy into the concept of
> Free 
> software and want their infrastructure to be Free software that
> works 
> together. This is a perfectly good target niche.

But it's still a niche, and not something that phone makers or telcos
are asking for, AFAIK.

> > 
> > Note of course, that Google contacts/calendar sync is already on
> > the
> > phone, and has been for a very long time now, so if Google is an
> > acceptable place for storing those things, it can be used (with
> > some
> > small caveats, as it seems only default contacts/calendar are
> > synced,
> > so alternate/subscribed calendars on Google don't get seem to be
> > exposed).
> working on the assumption that people are using Google to run all
> their 
> stuff means that the phone is competing head to head with Android on 
> Google's playing field. It isn't necessarily wrong to support those 
> users, and yes, they might be a numerically large target, however
> there 
> is a wide open opportunity to change the rules of the game and go a 
> different way.

It's not an assumption. Sure, there will be a few who have never used
Android and don't use Google at all, who buy an Ubuntu phone. But most
are migrating from Android. Google is also a complete service, for
which most all of the necessary code already existed, so it required
very little design and engineering work, and was included from the
beginning.

An ownCloud solution requires significantly more design and engineering
work, because the system is vastly more complicated. There are plenty
of other solutions for various things, that I'm sure people would like
to see implemented too. LDAP, Exchange, NIS, ActiveDirectory, or
others.

There's also plenty of additional concerns, because we are talking
about phones after all, and they don't have unlimited storage, memory,
power, or network, readily available. How much stuff do we install by
default? Features are great, but only so much stuff will fit in a 2GB
partition.

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