Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books

Everywhere I turn to nowadays it's always cloud this and that. To those clueless people, IT IS NOT NEW!

What is called cloud computing has been around for ages. If you have ever used an online FTP/File server to up/download stuff, used Gmail as your primary office and email suite, then you have been a cloud head all these time.

And now Canonical in all their effort to take a piece of the cloud action decides to sync all address books and Tomboy notes to the one.ubuntu.com. An excerpt from Elliot Murphy's mailing post :

This release was uploaded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) a few hours ago, narrowly beating the final release freeze, so it will have a LOT of new users. We're putting the final touches on the server side of https://one.ubuntu.com and by the time Ubuntu 9.10 is released on October 29th every single Ubuntu user will have an address book stored in CouchDB that replicates with one.ubuntu.com, and Tomboy notes that are replicated via a web API at the application but then stored in CouchDB and carried along in the CouchDB replication that we have set up. Optionally they can also store all their Firefox bookmarks in CouchDB and have those replicated as well. We'll be doing our best to help teach application developers to use CouchDB in order to "cloud-enable" their apps. A couch on every desktop!

You can read the full post here.

What are they smoking? Ubuntu so far has done much good to the FOSS world. Is this a sign they want to be evil? I certainly hope not.