While we launched the beta today with file sharing, our plan is to make Ubuntu One much more than a file sharing service: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/8843 "Ubuntu One provides shared synchronised storage and databases for developers: you store your data and Ubuntu One takes care of making it available to every other person and every other machine you’ve shared it to. In addition to this set of simple APIs which you can use to get synchronised data, Ubuntu One also offers services built on top of these: work with your users’ contacts to make it easy to share information with other people, and build services on top of all these APIs which work everywhere, both from the web and from the desktop."

-elliot https://launchpad.net/~statik/

It's hard to see myself choosing this over Dropbox. Currently no cross-platform support, and it's still a proprietary client.

*edit: My bad. I googled for 'ubuntuone license' and the excerpt said it was proprietary. The Launchpad page now says GPLv3. No code released yet, but I'm sure it will follow as the project goes public:

https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client

Well if this goes open source maybe we will indeed have a dropbox for private servers.

That's only for the client though, not for the server.

If they develop an open source client for it, someone will develop an open source server to interact with the client. That's the way it works!

maybe dropbox will one-up them by open-sourcing their software?

Am I the only one who thinks these prices are really high? I appreciate the free 2GB you get, but I think $10/month for 8GB extra is just way to much. I can get a VPS with 20GB of disk drive for that. With something like $25/year I wouldn't mind at all, but for $10/month I expect a bit more than 2->10GB.

Looks like dropbox for ubuntu.

It does certainly look like that, but I think that this could turn into something alot cooler, something alot more than Dropbox.

I'd imagine that this will stay Ubuntu-exclusive and will start to act as a 'your-computer-in-the-cloud' sort of thing where you can plug your Ubuntu device into the network and have all of your apps and data instantly available.

Ubuntu-only-ness will let the dev team concentrate on making sure that the default Ubuntu apps will sync perfectly and it's open-source nature will let people write other clients that concentrate on other devices.

FWIW, this is all wild speculation. I think that Shuttleworth already knows what the market is like and I'm sure he's taken Dropbox/rsync-users into account.

But OSS.