It's not the first time, either.
I don't think we've removed developer-facing features before. We've
removed services when they didn't work. I *might* be forgetting
something, but I think not. Obviously.
One thing is removing it from Ubuntu One. If you can't manage
the large amounts of users and data, then that means U1 shouldn't have
been taken out of beta and that it in no way is ready for general use.
A reasonable point. Which I disagree with, at several levels, but I
don't think this is the place to get into that.
This is another example of Canonical showing poor judgement in its
communication.
communication is hard. Again, I disagree that this particular instance
was an example of us struggling to communicate; I think you're reading
more and less from my email than what I thought I was putting into
it.
However, removing support for tools that apps depend upon to store and
retrieve data locally is something else entirely. It is incomprehensible
to me that you would even consider this.
I don't know where you got the impression I or we were proposing or
suggesting that the distribution do that.
Ubuntu One, as upstream of desktopcouch, is letting Ubuntu know that
we're not going to go on working on desktopcouch, and the service is
going away from our servers. This is the next step after letting the
more prominent stakeholders know in person at UDS.
We can't know
what's going on internally in Canonical, but we know for a fact that it
is willing to drop support without warning.
The email you responded to was the warning. Had you talked with the
Ubuntu One developers at UDS or since then, we would've told you. We
individually talked with the main stakeholders at or before UDS. We had
U1DB sessions at UDS, and we have openly talked about the status of
couchdb with developers since around that time.
You're not only making fools of developers, however. You're also making
fools out of advocates. As late as yesterday, I wrote about Ubuntu
becoming a very attracting platform with focus on phones, tablets, etc.
One of the things I wrote about, was the ability to sync databases
between your devices, enabling you to keep working even when you're
offline. Yesterday, that symbolised the strength and potential of
Ubuntu. Today, the same thing symbolises uncertainty and unreliability.
It's interesting that you mention this, because the drive to enable
Ubuntu to be that platform is one of the things that is pushing us to
fix things. CouchDB wasn't working for us to do what we and you want to
do with the platform, so we're swapping the component out for one that
*will* work.
Thank you for caring,
