 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Nikolo, investigate some story and then finds out it's super weird. Like, okay, so these days I was actually looking at how Ubuntu Touch came to be and then be a bit less because, you know, Canonical actually dropped founding and support for Ubuntu Touch and the more I discovered about the project, the more I was like, sorry, what? It's probably things that I should have known, I didn't, I do now. So this story of Ubuntu Touch starts on the 31st of October 2011 and it starts from a blog post of Mark Shettleworth, I guess it's pronounced and we gotta talk about this guy. You probably know about this guy, fun fact I just discovered about him and I was shocked. So, okay, first in 2020 he was estimated to be worth 500 million pounds, sorry actually, and that already was quite a shock and he has like a private jet which is called Canonical One, tells you anything and he actually started Canonical, is I think the founder, but for sure was the CEO for most of the time, he actually stepped back during the period of this time, he then got back at being the CEO which he currently is of Canonical which is why I probably should have known about the guy but I didn't and he founded the Ubuntu Foundation of which he called himself the benevolent dictator for lives, very similarly to what the Python author did and he has always also, sorry, been a patron of Katie, giving Katie some significant chunk of money back these times that I've been talking about, then I stopped, I'm not too sure why I wasn't in Katie at the time. Also, and this is pretty relevant I think, in 2002 he actually flew to space, he paid 20 million dollars which today are worth like 30 million dollars to go to space in Soyuz and he stayed at the International Space Station and I gotta read this quote that comes directly from Wikipedia, yes this is my source, it's Wikipedia, don't don't say anything, he also had a radio conversation with Nelson Mandela and a 14 year old whilst being in the space station and a 14 year old South African girl, Michelle Foster who asked him to marry her, he politely dodged the question stating that it was he was very honored at the question before changing the subject, this is amazing, I just imagine this person paying 20 millions to be in space and then getting asked to be married from a 14 year old just after having talked to Nelson Mandela, how did I not know about this story? Sorry, as I was saying 2011 he posted an article whilst working you know not at CEO but for canonical products and he says that in his vision buy Ubuntu 14.04 which will be released three years after the blog post roughly, Ubuntu will power everything like tablets, phones, TVs, smart screens, everything and this will be powered by Unity which was announced just a year prior and Unity was actually meant he says to be convergent and to power up all kinds of devices this is the kind of statement that you say aged like milk about you know sadly sadly this Ubuntu touch is actually gets demoed by him at the 2013 CS which is pretty significant and it was baked in the 13.10 release which means that it was indeed on time so what was missing is you know being able to sell the thing on actual hardware that is actually pretty significant like pretty important if you want end users to use your operating system for mobile phones because Ubuntu touch is that if you didn't know you need to have the option of having a phone that you can just buy and it has already Linux on it otherwise end users won't really care about putting them there themselves so what did they do now here's the second completely trippy part which I didn't know about because I'm too young or something Ubuntu try to make the phone themselves and to do that they launched a fundraising on indiegogo and that already looks weird so I thought okay how much money do you even ask to start mass producing linux phones and they decided to ask 32 million dollars and when I heard that I was like sure like kitty sometimes has troubles like raising I don't know 15k for projects like kitty and live we managed to in a month so that was very successful but 32 million dollars for a linux phone nobody is gonna let's be realistic there was no way to reach that goal 32 million dollars so I was like okay how much did they actually achieve like 10k 20k 12 million dollars they managed to raise and again I was like 12 million for a linux phone wow so apparently there were even companies like Bloomberg who donated 800 thousand dollars because they actually believed in a project that would make sure that the phones wouldn't be you know a monopoly of just a couple of companies but there will actually would actually be an open source alternative which is indeed super exciting so what went wrong like you would say okay 12 million dollars that probably enough to make a phone but the fact that they didn't reach the goal mean that all of this money was returned to whoever did this donation so because the goal was not reached none of these 12 million dollars that were raised were actually of any use they were all returned which is sad 12 million so just to give you an idea of what this ubuntu phone could have been it's the project name was called ubuntu edge again if you have I don't know 10 years more than me you probably know about the project but let me tell you again it was meant to be convergent also in the sense that you could plug in a monitor and whoa it becomes an actual desktop operating system similarly to what the pine phone is also like trying to achieve the librem was librem phones that has always been the idea it should have been a dual booth with android and ubuntu mobile which makes sense you want to make sure that there's all of the options are to use all of the apps that you probably rely upon for gigabyte of rams 128 gigabytes of internal storage a screen that was 4.5 inches 720 by 1280 which feels very 2013 because this happened 2013 and the price would have been 695 dollars however none of this happened so what did ubuntu canonical do so they again needed to have some phones that you could just buy and make sure that your hardware your software sorry is in them so they contacted hardware manufacturers and my personal guess is that the biggest hardware manufacturers like Lenovo blackberry what were the hardware from manufacturers in 2013 I don't know blackberry totally totally blackberry the biggest ones probably weren't interested in this technology and they preferred something that was done by a super big company such as google with android or ios where they can't have that you get a point however however they managed to get in touch with two hardware makers that promised to deliver phones that were meant to be run with ubuntu touch the first one is bq from spanish and the second one is maizu from china and this kind of worked both of them actually released phones and bq also tablets that were running ubuntu touch and that you could actually buy and use i think currently there are some devices that you can buy of this kind however it was clear that this was not quite the size that canonical or ubuntu were aiming for so what happened is that in 2017 mark got back to being the CEO of ubuntu and evidently some things had to change i guess that these kind of projects were actually putting some financial stress on the company as well at the end there your your product is ubuntu you're not google sadly you're not apple so i understand having to cut back some expenses so they actually killed off both unity and as a consequence consequence the ubuntu touch project these were just five years ago so you you probably remember this and i think that mark actually gave a nice article about why this happened how he was generally sad about this having to happen and to be honest i fully believe me believe him i do think that he was like interested in the project it does feel weird that you know the fundraising was missed by 20 million dollars and he also spent 20 million dollars to get to space but that's irrelevant he says and i want to quote i took the view that if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and the technological industry where there is a substantial frustration with the existing closed alternatives available to manufacturers i was wrong on both counts in the community our efforts were seen as fragmentation and not innovation and industry has not rallied at a possibility instead taking a better the devil you know approach to those firm factors or investing in homegrown platforms what the unity 8 team has delivered so far is beautiful usable and solid but a respect that markets and community ultimately decide what which products grow and which disappear and this kind of was the end of the project as it was led by ubuntu and canonical but this was not the end of ubuntu touch as a whole thanks to the efforts of ub ports which is a foundation actually that was opened in the same year 2017 to continue the development of unity as a whole and to be boards and they've they've made progress as an example ubuntu unity is back to being an official flavor of ubuntu which you can download and use and they've kept going and done a public beta of unity 8 which was currently being worked upon when in 2017 everything was shut down so they have done project progress there's also lately a new variety of phones that run linux and we've got the librem the pine phone but also the fear phone which i totally love and i'm very sad that i never had the chance to buy one these phones run linux very natively which is super cool so compared to 10 years ago we do have more attention i think to the mobile hardware manufacturing linux open community and there's also some more phones that were originally released as commercial android closed source phones that now people actually manage to install linux on which is also exciting but i don't have anything else to say really that was my shook my shock like discovering about the fundraising and about mark blew blew blew my word away i totally did not know about this to be honest it was an exciting journey and i wanted to share so thanks everybody for following along and as always see you tomorrow with yet another video of me doing things tokyo bye