Can be a good strategy indeed, unless stock is Nokia in recent days . It's still very doubtful that this phone ever get the green light(if not, you get your money back). This campaign is mostly to see if the market is ready for a device like this rather than actually get the money. 30 000 is not that much world wide, but from that the snowball can start rollin...

Seems to be harder to sell phone for $750+. People comparing with samsung phones.

Anyway, Would be nice to keep on Rockin' In The Free World

Let's hope more people want to do that!

To those criticizing Canonical for openness may I remind you that Nokia's user interfaces and other components for Maemo/Meego are closed source and encumbered with patents. Canonical has done no such with either Ubuntu desktop or touch.

It's not just about openness, it's about the upstream contributions too.

As a case in point, the Linux Foundation released a report in April 2013 about the contributions that make up the Linux 3.2 release. There's a couple of tables in it which show which players sponsored how many changes. The one below is the changes since 2.6.36. notice where Nokia are and where Google (who benefit most through Android, and their own infrastructure uses company wide) and also AMD who make shitloads of hardware. BTW this is Nokia who canned their Linux phone involvement last year, and the team that made the majority of these contributions have popped up elsewhere and are still working with the community and pushing future contributions with them too.


edit: btw, Canonical doesn't pop up at all in the report. The link Mikecomputing shared from Phoronix makes the argument why using CLAs with a GPLv3 licence is A Bad Thing.

WTF, did AMD contribute with 1,4%?!?! I think we should give him some more credit!

But that joke aside. It's a valid point, but if you look at the list, Its some of the biggest companies in the world on that list, not small or semi small companies. And there is a reason for that.

But this device is not just about openness, It's also a new way of creating devices where people can participate ,contribute by funding, deciding, promote, share and so forth. It's much cooler than get a device in your hand one day. This is Openness too, It's more than code...

it's not easy to see that this is a $1000 when it's not built yet. poeple seems to think it's a $600, but I believe it will be something extra if it's ever was built. ahead of it's time Unfortunately, the rest of the world don't see it that way

How is this an argument? Canonical makes a distro. They might not have much to contribute to Linux Kernel. That does not make their other open source contributions meaningless.

I'm sure you did not mean to implicate that every open source contribution (such as us application developers) is meaningless unless we also contribute to Linux Kernel.

So if you want to make a point about Canonical's unwillingness to contribute upstream, and using Linux kernel as an example, then you need to show that Canonical has lots of private patches to Linux kernel that they're unwilling to contribute upstream.

Nokia submitting patches doesn't make Maemo any less of a proprietary platform.

i always wonder why the hell there is so much arguing and mudslinging from the corners of linux?

Yes i use Ubuntu 12.04 - Mate Desktop (my remastered version) because it works, i have tried many others but kept coming back to ubuntu because most HW and sorts worked out of the box.

I can see the arguments about the PURE linux open source and such but come on guys, this is just one more thing besides steam that helps get more users over to linux, and some will branch out to explore the linux world and may level up to purest status .

Just in the last 2-3 years things have really accelerated in my view with Steam, R PI, more HW/driver support.

This campaign for the Edge will also give MASSIVE publicity towards the linux world.

The main thrust of my post was nothing to do with Ubuntu, the line about them was an afterthought edited in.

As others (I think it was qwazix) have said here on TMO, maemo itself is a bit of a mess with its tangled dependencies, but what the team did with those 5 devices (ok 6 with the unsold n950) is allow others to use their work by pushing stuff upstream, and then the Meego move happened which facilitated others to continue their work even when Nokia and Intel shifted their focus elsewhere. 5 devices! How many have Google made, and how much financial muscle do they have?


I was tempted by the Edge, and probably would've got the $600 deal on Tuesday, but they'd gone by then, and I can't justify spending the extra money just now. I've already made a commitment to buy the Jolla device, and a mental one for Vivaldi, so in the end the Edge would be a device too many for me. I'll probably give them a donation anyway if it helps them over the line, as I do want Linux devices to take hold in the mobile space.

The Phoronix article mikecomputing linked referred to this blog by Matthew Garrett, on the constraints a CLA has when combined with GPLv3 . And here is a list of software that they require contributors to sign a CLA for.

Canonical makes a bad distro. Ubuntu is not good, Unity is not good. I hope Ubuntu becomes a BSD OS or Android distro.
I hope that Canonical let linux live in peace!