EOL for couchdb and desktopcouch

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

Den 21. nov. 2011 12:48, skrev John Rowland Lenton:
> For these same three years we have created and maintained desktopcouch,
> which is a desktop service (and related library) to access CouchDB more
> conveniently. Because we are no longer going to pursue CouchDB, we will
> no longer be developing desktopcouch; in fact, if anybody wants to take
> over, we'll be happy to work with you to make that official. For the
> upcoming 12.04 the Ubuntu One packages will not depend on desktopcouch
> nor couchdb in any way, and we'd recommend the distribution seriously
> consider whether they want to continue having the package in main,
> especially if no maintainer shows up.
>

I'm rather dismayed by this, I have to say. First you convince 
developers to rely on your infrastructure for their apps, and then, out 
of the blue, you remove key parts of it? It's not the first time, 
either. 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. 
This is another example of Canonical showing poor judgement in its 
communication.

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. If you want to attract 
developers, then you simply cannot just remove tools that developers 
depend upon. Storage infrastructure is a fairly critical part of most 
computer systems. If you can't rely on that, then how on earth can you 
expect people to invest time and money in developing for Ubuntu? I've 
spent months on my app, and now it's lost most of it's value, if not 
all. I'll have to re-write it from scratch. Should I add support for 
Unity at all, or might that also suddenly be dropped? This is not the 
way to create enthusiasm. Except for SSO, the database functionality was 
the one big USP that Ubuntu One had. Speaking of SSO... 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. This is a very good reason 
not to rely on Ubuntu SSO for anything. After all, who knows if it'll be 
there tomorrow? It is really sad to see myself writing something like 
that. It's what Windows users use as an argument for sticking to Windows.

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.

I'm flabbergasted. This is not a wise decision.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad