You’ve probably already noticed that Canonical announced today their plan to shut down their Ubuntu One service. Canonical CEO Jane Silber wrote that “the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage.”
We get it, and we know there is no free ride. With storage so inexpensive now, Ubuntu One users should consider ownCloud as their alternative. Ubuntu One users can easily install ownCloud themselves on their own hardware or use one of our providers. In other words, your data reside where you want it. And, ownCloud is fully open source.
Ubuntu One was a great service. It was about more than syncing documents – Ubuntu One could synchronize installed software between computers, sync contacts and stream music. It is unfortunate for Ubuntu users to lose this.
ownCloud offers most of the functionality Ubuntu One offered and more importantly, it can be easily extended by apps. We would welcome apps which fill in the gaps for Ubuntu users! And of course, ownCloud already offers functionality that would be new for Ubuntu One users, like bookmark syncing, collaborative editing and much more.
We have set up a page to help users of Ubuntu One users migrate to ownCloud and track the state of our relevant features. See it here: https://github.com/owncloud/core/wiki/Ubuntu-One-Migration
You can learn about app development for ownCloud here: http://doc.owncloud.org/server/6.0/developer_manual/app/index.html
