According to that article on OMGBuntu the Snaps project will continue for
now. As Shuttleworth says in his blog, ultimately its the industry and the
community who will decide, whether containered desktop apps are what we want,
and if so, which format we want to use. Hopefully we will make that decisions
at least partly on technical merit, and not just schoolyard politics ;P
Shuttleworth shows a lot of integrity in admitting that Ubuntu's push into
the mobile device market has failed, like Mozilla's FirefoxOS before it. It's
brave to face up to the fact that the software projects that were started to
pursue that goal now fail a cost/ benefit analysis for his company, as he did
with Ubuntu One, instead of continuing to throw money at those projects out
of sheer bloody-mindedness.
I wouldn't write off Unity, Mir, Ubuntu Touch etc just yet though. I've met a
few guys that have been working on them professionally for years, who really
believe in them. They also disagree with Shuttleworth a lot, although they're
smart enough to keep quiet about it at work. I can imagine some of them
continuing or forking those projects, whether its under the umbrella of the
Ubuntu Foundation, or some other incubator like the Apache Foundation or
Software Conservancy or somesuch.
