Ubuntu's CEO, Jane Silber, in her blog post on the Canonical blog has announced that Ubuntu One, Canonical's online storage solution is being shut down. Since this was posted on the 2nd of April, I thought it was a late April Fool's joke, alas! It was not.

Ubuntu One will be available until June 1, but as of Wednesday, customers can no longer sign up for it or make purchases. Users can download their data untill July 31, after which it will be deleted. Customers with paid accounts will have their fees refunded back to the day of the announcement. Canonical said it will try to give users an easy path to download their content and migrate to other services. Also, Ubuntu One Music services are going to be shut down along with this. But the shutdown will not affect the Ubuntu One single sign-on or payment services or the U1DB database service.

So, why did they do this?

Isn't this essential for developing a 'unified' experience? To simply put it, it's not worth the trouble. As mentioned in the blog post:

"Other services are now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage.If we offer a service, we want it to compete on a global scale, and for Ubuntu One to continue to do that would require more investment than we are willing to make." -Jane Silber

Instead, this investment is going towards developing Ubuntu Touch and other mobile tech, which is appropriate. But now one question remains, how do they manage cloud storage on Ubuntu Touch, like Android using Google Drive and Windows using OneDrive? And this is essential because they want a 'unified' experience across all devices. For the answer to this, we need to wait and watch.

Is there a silver lining to all this?

Yes, there is a silver lining to all this. Canonical plans to Open Source the Ubuntu One Server "to give others an opportunity to build on this code to create an open source file syncing platform."