14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has recently released the source code behind that file synchronization server for Ubuntu One and it looks like the project has been put to good use.
It took Canonical almost a year to get the proprietary bits of Ubuntu One ready for being used by the community and it looks like someone has found that idea to be worthwhile. Granted, it's one of the developers from Canonical who that transformed Ubuntu One into an open source project, but it's good to see that it found a home.
The Ubuntu One storage services that were offered by Canonical were discontinued a while back. Canonical found that it cost them a lot of money to keep it alive and they figured that they need to close it. It's was pretty much a money pit, even if it provided some very useful services. They just couldn't compete with the likes of Dropbox or Google Drive, and they weren't making enough money from the paid subscriptions.
The project has been forked into Magicicada
One of the developers that worked on Ubuntu One took the open source code and forked it into Magicicada, and it looks like it's going to be useful again.
"Well, with Natalia we already had the Magicicada Project, which was a GUI to interact with the client. So we forked the rest of the projects and naturally put them under that namespace. So, the whole solution stack currently is: Magicicada Server ( the one that 'lives in the cloud' and holds the files so all your clients can access them), Magicicada Client (the application that runs in background), Magicicada Protocol (protocol implementation that allows them to talk each other), and the Magicicada GUI," developer Bitácora de Vuelo wrote.
They already have the project up on Launchpad and soon we'll able to see the old Ubuntu One code put to good use once more.