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The Source
Just to dispel any rumors or myths to the contrary, we are – of course – planning on checking our changes back into the Linux branch of XBMC, just as we’ve done with all previous releases.
Trying to release a stable and polished product to our beloved OS X community while the Linux XBMC code churns like an Amish farmer making butter ain’t easy. I’ve been burned in the past trying to get some changes checked in and then finding that I had to update more of my local tree than I wanted to as a result.
In addition, posting comments here about violating licenses, harassing our team every few hours on IRC, and sending accusatory emails are really not the best way to get on our Christmas list. Contrary to popular belief, we do this for fun, and the less fun it becomes, the less likely we are to continue doing it.
In the longer term, we’re looking into solutions to this which will likely involve either creating an OS X branch in SVN, or creating a GIT repository somewhere where you can get access to more realtime source updates.
Until then, please, be kind and patient as we work to resolve a few more issues in the betas and then get our changes back in SVN.
59 comments59 Comments so far
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Illegitimi non carborundum.
Keep up the good work, guys. I’m in for another beer when 0.5.0 hits releasable status. The remote changes rock.
@Scott: The Latin made me choke on my water I laughed so hard. Haven’t heard that one since college. Thanks for the note.
Thanks for your hard work. I am very excited about XBMC on OS X!
You guys rock!
I’m sure the GPL doesn’t actually say you have to make it publicly available, just available. If you email it to anyone that requests it, that should be enough!
Just keep this great project rocking! Forget the whinners!
Indeed, ignore the people complaining. You could just stick up a big archive of the code as it is to keep people happy…
I find it hillarious that this pisses you off like this. Just face the facts your violating GPL
@ChoccyHobNob: Read section 2. of http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
Sorry, meant section 3.
@RogerL: Did you really read section3? Did you understand what it says? If you want the source, it can be mailed to you on CD. If you pay the costs for shipping and burning, of course
@RogerL: If he’s *really* in violation of the GPL, it’s not up to 3rd parties to browbeat him and spam his website. The XBMC team should contact him and demand compliance to the license they published under. The GPL has no “and otherwise the mob will get you!” provision.
@urandom: that’s what I thought lol, as long as you provide it if requested, on any acceptable machine readable format you comply.
@RogerL: did you actually request a copy of the source before claiming infringement? Just face the facts you’re wrong, I am right. (note it’s “You’re” not “your”)
I’m a big supporter of FOSS and would be the first to complain if a project was actually breaking the GPL, however I am not one of the GPL nazis who troll open source projects looking for trouble and flagging it up when there isn’t any. Too many uninformed people think that the GPL says you have to provide a zip or CVS/SVN of the source to comply, and they all seem to like making the lives of good dev’s harder by trying to bash them a big GPL shaped stick to fore them to release source code they are not happy with yet. Hell if I was working on something GPL’d there is no way I’d release the source in the condition it is in when it’s beta, I’d need to clean it up and document it before letting the public see it, that doesn’t mean I’m not complying, it means I have pride in what I release to the world for review.
Don’t even get me started on “The letter of the law” v’s “The spirit of the law”
I wonder if this is just mac hate going on.
Agents of Microsoft trying to destroy good open source projects. :tinfoilhat:
This kind of lameness does nothing to further the GPL cause, instead it just generates resentment towards it. Attacking some guys for porting a project to a different platform for fun and not checking their changes back in yet? Guess we’ve forgotten all about SCO and those happy times already…
@ChoccyHobNob:
Re-read that section of the GPL. If the source isn’t provided along with the executable or object code, then the person distributing that code must provide a written offer for the source. The intent is that the developer should make it quite clear that the executable is based upon GPL work, and that the work is available upon request. Neither of the recently released betas have included such a written offer. This puts these releases in clear violation of the GPL.
That said, I really don’t care what’s happening in this situation. I just don’t like it when people misrepresent the GPL (like you have.) Statements like:
“Hell if I was working on something GPL’d there is no way I’d release the source in the condition it is in when it’s beta, I’d need to clean it up and document it before letting the public see it, that doesn’t mean I’m not complying, it means I have pride in what I release to the world for review.”
are simply and patently untrue. You would be out of compliance. If you release object code, you’re under obligation to either simultaneously release the source code, or to provide a written offer for said source. Period. End of story.
@ChoccyHobNob:
Oh, and by the way, you might consider writing grammatically correct sentences and spelling words correctly if you’re going to comment on other people’s spelling and grammar. The sentence I quoted is a horrible run-on. You’re also missing a lot of commas, and “vs” doesn’t have an apostrophe in it.
/Grammar Nazi who only picks on people who are Grammar Nazis.
@chockyfight: Consider this my written offer to provide source upon request. Mail a USB drive (at least 512MB) to P.O. Box 791922, Paia, HI 96708. I will format said drive, add my current source tree, and fill any remaining space with some decent enough goat porn. Please don’t forget to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
@chockyfight: I believe you were just ‘owned’. Enjoy your goat porn.
@elan: Keep up the great work! It is much appreciated
Please disregard all these complaints, as it’s pretty clear what your intentions were/are with this project. While they might be technically correct, I think the spirit of the GPL is what truly matters.
sheesh. thanks for all your hardwork elan (and everyone else).
@Elan
I’ve been following your work since a few weeks now and I’d like to congratulate you and the team about the great work. People don’t realize the time it takes and the effort involved in developing/troubleshooting software, time to answer emails and to cope with unsatisfied individuals, time that you don’t spend with your family and dog.
For me OSX XBMC give me a satisfying experience watching video on my tv set, with a decoding quality that I was only able to achieve with Ffdshow settings on XP with GBPVR. I can do that quite easily now on OSX without having to install codecs or to set up anything else (like quicktime and Frontrow). For that THANK YOU!
Bye the way I’ve just sent you a small contribution through PPal.
@elan: Thanks, but as I stated, my concern is not with this project, but with bozos who think that they know what’s in the GPL and spout off misinformation. I didn’t mean to offend you–I stated quite clearly that I didn’t care what you were doing. I’m glad you guys are willing to put in so much time and effort to port XBMC to the Mac.
@john: I don’t really think so, but you’re welcome to your opinion.
I guess this is a sensitive issue. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but it really gets my goat (pun intended) when people like ChoccyHobNob spread such blatant misinformation.
(Sorry for the spam)
I forgot to explicitly apologize to Elan. I seriously didn’t mean to upset you.
I’m sorry.
@chockyfight: It should have been clear from my attempt at a humorous response that I wasn’t offended or upset. Thanks for your kind words. I want to stay on the right side of the GPL, and you’ve helped me understand how I can do that.
It might not be a terribly bad idea to include a copy of gpl-2.0.txt and a README that explains source availability in the DMG for future releases – beta or otherwise.
@elan you and the osxbmc team rock. Please ignore the idiots. You have a lot of support from the users community.
pish posh, meh. It is clear that elan was in the clear with the intent. time will pass an people will be happy… Do you honestly think elan was trying to pull the wool over ya? clear mistake, lets move along.
……and leave the team to what they do best: continually deliver improvements to a well loved software package that you get to use.
Not sure about all the paperwork issues but this app makes having a Mini a real joy. Great stuff …
pmcd
Wow, the lameness of certain people amaze me. Get a life, seriously. Anyone who is complaining in any way, shape, or form about this project and any license compliance is:
1) Not getting laid nearly enough.
2) Not enjoying OSXBMC
3) See #1
@elan, I hope you can rise above and just realize that 99.99%+ of everyone is very grateful for your hard work and enjoying the result immensely, and anyone with a half a brain understands the reasons for doing as you are with the source currently.
Don’t let the GPL trolls get you down elan, love the port (looking forward to the new mac-mini to maybe get into osxbmc with) but I’m sure most of the people asking for source are just hyped to see some of the cool features from osxbmc back in the trunk right? Or maybe that’s already happening I’m not sure.
either way keep on rocking.
Put it on github (http://www.github.com) and call it a day. Xbmc core should be on git anyways. I can’t even imagine how they’re managing all those patches with SVN. Blegh.
Here’s a quickie post on a clean way to migrate:
http://www.simplisticcomplexity.com/2008/03/05/cleanly-migrate-your-subversion-repository-to-a-git-repository/
i complain about the gpl violation because it is violating MY RIGHTS to code I WROTE. i am not a gpl troll, i just won’t accept that my terms are blatantly violated as they are in this case
I agree. I wrote a number of elite utilities – one of them does your horoscope, the other one figures out what lottery numbers will win. People complained a lot about the user-unfriendliness of these utilities, but whatever, I was busy getting laid and raking in the cash, and I put the stuff out for the community.
It pisses me off that now you’ve taken my work, cleaned it up, slapped a new GUI around it, tweaked it to play tv shows or whatever the fuck, and got hundreds of people enjoying it. How many of them know that it’s built in part on my code base? I demand that you publish it right now. Seriously, stop what you’re doing and put it up, because I want it right now. It’s keeping me from exerting my rights as a libertarian and my beard is starting to fall out.
Publishing source is as simple as running ’svn diff’ and posting the output. It doesn’t even need to be committed to SVN.
I think excuses like lack of QA, software engineering, being ashamed of your code or whatever are moot because this isn’t a commercial product, this is a GPL project and if there’s one thing that people expect from it, it’s source code. By people, I don’t mean “our beloved OS X community”, I mean the other 20+ XBMC developers that haven contributed to more than 99% of what constitutes the OS X port:
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Team_XBMC_and_Others
(wonder why this link is conveniently missing from this entire blog)
@Jon maddox, git is great. We’ve never needed it. We might though. However, the method described in that link is not the way to import a full project, at least not if you want to keep branch and tag history. Moreover, using git wouldn’t have helped much in this case because most branching is usually done locally when developing with git. This isn’t a VCS issue.
For the record, I’m not a GPL troll either, but prioritizing binary releases over timely commits is obviously not in good GPL spirit, especially when all it takes to post the source is a one-liner.
Thanks for your hard work.
you rock
@d4rk: Thanks for posting a mostly reasonable comment. The primary reason why I don’t just post the raw diffs is that I suspect, given the level of vitriol being spewed around here, the changes would make it back into SVN, likely modified (because some of them are pretty crappy), thus making my job of merging ever harder. The secondary and no less honest reason is that I don’t react well to people pushing me around.
This is our hard work, and I ask that you trust that the changes will be checked in (as I’ve *always* done in the past), and that you please desist from the harassment, which isn’t helping. My commit patterns are odd, yes, but I’ve never not checked in changes before, so why would I start now? This is escalating to a level bordering on the ridiculous. I might expect this level of pointy-hairedness from a day job, but not from an open source project.
So relax, be kind, rewind, be gentle, be patient, and with all the extra time I’ll have from not having to respond to all this poison, I’ll be merged in no time!
Even if that was a joke, that written offer is probably not good enough. To comply with gpl, one must supply the source along the executable or a written offer along the executable.
One must still be able to provide the exact code the given executable was based on, no changes. Thus current source tree isn’t enough :/.
svn diffs would be fine I should think, thou public access to a repo you use would be even better. (atleast for team xbmc point of view).
if you use git internally, can’t you publish your git repo, and pull from xbmc svn using git svn?
What is everybody talking about? GPL SVN etc..?
I just want new pictures of barkley!:D
I am not a GPL troll and this is not a threat but meant a good to know FYI fact which is not meant to harass the developers of OSXBMC.
I been working with open source for almost 10-years and to me planning to release source code in time but not actually doing it is really a clear GPL violation and IMHO resolving that should be prioritized over any future releases of OSXBMC. The GPL licensing means that you have to make the full source code available together at the same time with any object code (binary files) compiled from GPL source code. You are not allowed to make an exception and first release binaries then wait days/weeks/months before making the full source code available to anyone who wants it, you are however allowed to do it the other way around and make the the full source code available before you release any compiled binaries from that GPL licenced source code. So always working in a public version control system like CVS, SVN or Git tree and having all code available in it before releasing any updated binaries is a very good concept, the only logistically realistic alternative is to always provide a ZIPPED archive with the full source code tree together with each binary release, that is what most Linux distributions did in the beginning before they started using a public version control system that anyone can access at any time and other methods than that is not possible for large projects like OSXBMC, (I mean, who seriously would have the time to burn a CD with that specific source code version each time someone requests the full source code of a specific Beta release).
Quote from the GPL preamble example: “if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights”".
If the likes of FFmpeg or MPLayer finds out that you are using their code but not releasing source code straight away then you not only risk getting OSXBMC blacklisted in the world of open source but also be publicly humiliated and possibly even sued. I ask you, is it worth the risk when the solution is to simply use a public version control system and always have the full source code available to anyone in there before any binaries are released?
beer o’clock?
All developers, be they Xbox, Linux, Windows, or OSX,
thanks for the hard work. I’m sorry if the demands of the community of users/leaches such as myself played any role in this… the push for binaries and updates, I mean. While not an excuse, it does reflect the love for the entire XBMC concept. I have it on an Xbox and on a Mac.
Please, I think everyone has the best intentions here and things will get back on track. I propose that we leave this to the the entire group of developers of this project to discuss in a calm and dignified manner so there are no misunderstandings in the future. By developers, I mean developers of XBMC… no developers with an axe to grind about GPL.
Also, to the folks who are introducted to XBMC via the OSX port… please be aware that there is a large community of people who have dedicated about 2000 years of work to getting XBMC to the point where it was when the porting started. They have every right to ask that the code be made available which Elan has clearly indicated he will do. If the developers can work with him on how to go about it in a painless manner that won’t cause problems (which seems to be happening now anyway) then this dark time can pass.
So please… lets leave this to the actual developers now. Their wisdom has gotten us this far, right?
@elan
Thanks!
Great work man, keep it up. I hope I can contribute some in the future, though for the moment it’ll be limited to bug reports!
This is great, I really like your piece of software. Keep the good work going!
-Nicolas
PS: I hope I can help in some way
The GPL trolls on this forum maybe annoying but they do have a point. I would just take their advice, arrogance otherwise, and just release the source code and make them go away.
They aren’t people like me who actually use XBMC and they’re just here wasting your time and forcing you to respond. I would really be disappointed if all the badgering got to you guys and you stopped development
The stuff you guys do is great, and you do it for free. It’s hard to imagine anyone asking for more, but every time you see some retard post about GPL, licenses and lawsuits, keep in mind that they’re not your audience but they do attract other vultures!
It seems to me that the XBMC product manager – whomever that may be – needs to rope everyone in. And hopefully the product manager is not a programmer – we all know that programmers are grumpy bastards with the people-skills of a tick.
Since the splinter of XBMC, there are now seperate groups working on the same linux codbase: linux of course, windows, and now OS X. Communicating and sharing of information is key to keep the work moving forward.
Whatever polices/practices are in place for the entire XBMC project should be followed by all groups. IMO, all blogs, forums, bug tracking, etc for the product should be hosted from xbmc.org. It just keeps things nicely associated and it decreases the chances of things like this happening.
@elan: I totally support all of your work on the OSX port. My new mac mini thanks you as well
@rest of XBMC team: Thank you too
I know you guys don’t hear it much here, but those of us in the know realize the importance you all have played in gettting XBMC to this point.
my 2 cents.
The funniest thing about the XBMC developers complaining is that they cannot freely distribute their compiled work without violating Microsoft’s license. Instead it is compiled and distributed by others that ARE willing to violate that license.
Mr. Pot meet Mr. Kettle.
@Charles
Nonsense. The Linux, Win32 and Mac builds for XBMC are available on Sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=87054
The Linux builds are also available under PPA for Ubuntu Hardy and Gutsy:
https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive
You’re referring obviously to the Xbox which is no longer the only platform XBMC is available for.
A funny and intuitive read of the situation.
But, I think this is a conversation best had privately between the concerned parties, not something to be hashed out in a public arena.
So…. when did these xbox guys rip off elan’s individually developed media centre?
Ha.
@d4rk
Of course I’m referring to the Xbox. It was the intended target of XBMC in the first place correct? If not then I think it should have been given a different name.
All I am saying is that for a project that started from people clearly violating a company’s license the developers complaining on this site seem a bit hypocritical.
Jeazzzss
Developers haven’t been violating anything as they aren’t distributing binaries.
I Love you guy’s!!
Yesterday i watched a movie on my new plasma! It’s super! Please keep on working on this promising program. PLEASE!
Keep up the good work and ignore the GPL trolls
@Elan: If I send you a USB drive can I get goat porn, too? I don’t need the source code, just the porn.
Seriously – don’t worry about these GPL-fags harassing you. They matter not. I’ve only been using OSXBMC for a week and it trumps every other media system out there. You keep focusing on an awesome product and watch for my beer donation.
I’m sure if anyone who actually mattered or had any actual stake in this contacted you about GPL compliance, you would do what it took to make it right, as needed. Only troll-babies would think you’re trying to pull something over. And we eat troll-babies.
Eq
Looks like this may not happen again. osxbmc has its own repository now .
Thanks elan for this awesome product. It’s the only app I’ve found that will play certain 1080p files flawlessly.
Maarut
I tend to agree with both sides.
First, it makes perfect sense for elan not wanting to commit his unfinished (beta) changes to the repository, and hold on to it until it’s out of beta. This way he will not have to re-merge changes later (both from the MacOS side and from the Linux side).
Second, releasing a source zip is no solution to above-mentioned problem, because then someone else will merge it to the repo.
Third, let’s stop calling people ‘GPL trolls’, I would assume that at least a part of them in this thread are XBMC developers too. The term is disrespectful.
Forth, the people calling for strictly following the GPL are correct. Source should have been released together with the binary release. I’m assuming elan was thinking they wouldn’t be so strict when he made the first beta binary available. I’m sure no harm was intended.
In the future, the best solution is probably to simply not release a ‘beta’ (ie, a version which elan doesn’t want to submit to SVN yet).
This will mean, however, a lower release rate. This will be annoying for some impatient end-users (which, I’m sure, outnumber the XBMC developers), but so be it.
People, please be patient.
You know, I could understand if osxbmc was a commercial product all the fervor for check-ins, but its not. A team of people have been working on a port because of their personal desire to make it happen.
They’ve promised that he will in good time check in his fixes, that all seems within the spirit of the GPL to me — their fears about checking in the code and problems with merging are 100% acceptable.
To those who say the argument of ‘being ashamed of your fixes/patches/modifications and wanting to fix them before making them public’ is void, are incorrect.
Since OSXBMC is a project for fun, these guys aren’t getting paid for it, however it will be a feather in their cap and a resume item that will be used to promote themselves in the future if they switch jobs from whatever they’re currently doing.
In the age of search engines scouring the depths of even source code repositories it simply makes sense to ensure that your check-ins are GOOD before you check them in.
Who wants a prospective employer googling you up and finding a bunch of threads in a bug-tracker about how crappy your code is? Let them polish their work and then they’ll commit back in. The promise has been made, now you must be patient.
Simply because you wrote a little or a lot of GPL code doesn’t give you the right to micromanage someone else’s project as rudely as some of you GPL guys have been trying to do.
You give free software a bad name and you scare off people who’re pure of intent but might not be savvy in the politics of “free” software.
Remember the three tenets of engineering:
1) Make it work
2) Make it work RIGHT
3) Make it pretty
And with the newly added rule of..
4) Check in your diffs
50 USD Donated to my all time favorite guys for making this amazing piece of software available on the mac!
Thank you!
And yeah, please ignore all negative people. Not just when it comes to the OSXBMC project, but always.