Thank you!

And yeah, please ignore all negative people. Not just when it comes to the OSXBMC project, but always.

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

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.

Thanks elan for this awesome product. It’s the only app I’ve found that will play certain 1080p files flawlessly.

Maarut

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

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.