With ever-increasing competition from the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive, Canonical today announced it will exit the “free storage wars” and shut down its Ubuntu One file services.
Canonical said that to continue offering Ubuntu One “on a global scale”, the project would require additional investment that simply wasn’t in its best interests. “We choose instead to invest in making the absolute best, open platform and to highlight the best of our partners’ services and content,” Jane Silber, Canonical’s chief executive said in a blog post.
If you navigate to the Ubuntu One homepage, you’ll see that it’s no longer possible to buy storage or music from the Ubuntu One store. The services in their current form will be shut down on June 1, although stored content will still be available to download until July 31 – at which point it’ll be deleted.
The company says it still believes in its file services and as such, will be releasing the code as open source software for the wider community to develop. “The shutdown will not affect the Ubuntu One single sign on service, the Ubuntu One payment service, or the backend U1DB database service,” she added.
A few weeks ago, Google slashed its Google Drive subscriptions down to $1.99 per month for 100GB and $9.99 per month for 1TB. Rivals such as Dropbox, Amazon and Microsoft are tempting customers with similar offers, and also offer a respectable amount of storage for free.
➤ Canonical (via VentureBeat)
Image Credit: Shutterstock
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