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There is a large amount of useful software available for the XBox1. From original apps, to ports of emulators from other platforms. The large majority are ports of existing software. This was made possible usually due to the original authors making the source code available, often under the GPL licence. The idea is that you are allowed to use, and modify the code, but any changes will also come under the same licence – meaning you must make the source available to others.

Current XBox 1 developers seem to have no respect for the GPL and no respect for the work of the original authors of the software they have ported. They are building on top of others work, but keeping the changes private. This is an issue that has been bothering me for some time, but has gotten significantly worse over recent times. We wouldn’t even have the large selection of emulators had the source not already been available. It seems a pretty easy concept to grasp – we benefit from  the source licence of the original software, so we should follow suite and comply with the original authors wishes. Licence aside, it’s still the respectful and decent thing to do.

What is happening currently, is not only a breach of the original licences, but very disrespectful to the original authors.

I have read countless excuses, the most prominent one being “Author X will use our code if we release it and they don’t release theirs”. This isn’t an excuse though – if they are breaking the GPL, then why not contact them about it (or the original authors of the software). The old saying “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. Devs should look at their own compliance first.

XBMC is GPL licenced for example, and as such we make all XBMC4XBOX code available in a public code repository – http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/development/ – if you use code from XBMC in your own GPL project, you are expected to release the source. (http://xbmc.org/team-xbmc/2003/10/31/please-respect-the-gpl-license/

There have been discussions (some heated) about this recently. I happened to be reading a forum earlier that suggested I was breaking the GPL, by providing XBMC code to others who are not GPL compliant. This is of course nonsense – and I did no such thing. Our code is public, and the author in question took the patch from our repository. Thanking me in a readme is actually no thanks at all if you are breaking the source licence. Today was the first I had heard about it, and the code in question.

Because of this and the fact XBMC code was being used in a few of the emulators I wrote a polite request on the http://www.emuxtras.net forum for the sourcecode to a emulator update. Shortly after my post was deleted, so I asked again and queried the deleted post.

Pretty shameful state of affairs. How do you think all the original authors would feel – to see the way their hard work is being abused. This childish attitude has to stop. I am hoping when I get a reply later the author in question on emuxtras is going to do the decent thing.

That goes for the all the GPL emulators over at Emuxtras that are not released with source, coinops, and the XBMC based apps such as Dragon/Vision. Release your source code. Even better work on it in a public repository, and you can all benefit from each others improvements, as well as making it far easier for people to collaborate.

It’s worth noting this doesn’t happen in the other homebrew scenes. This bad behaviour seems an Xbox exclusive.

One last note:
Something that came up in an earlier discussion, was an accusation of double standards on our part, for arguing about the GPL and then providing builds created with the XDK, which is a breach of Microsoft’s end user licence. One wrong does not excuse another, but we will not be providing any new builds.

News from http://xbmc.org – http://xbmc.org/zag/2012/10/05/10-anniversary-for-xbmc/

Note that this news is written as a perspective from XBMC not XBMC4XBOX (Although it’s a 10 year celebration for us too). Thanks and a big congrats to Team XBMC for their hard work building XBMC, and taking it from the XBOX onto other platforms. Kudos!

Happy Birthday To Us!

Today marks a very important and proud milestone in our history. On 5th October 2002, one of the first ever betas of the XBMC source code got uploaded, as the result of a merge between two different home theatre applications. Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joined the Xbox Media Player team and the two projects were merged. The first release of the combined projects was called “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released, 10 years ago to the day!

We have had many releases since then, reaching the first stable of the newly named “Xbox Media Center” v1.0.0 in 2004, another name change to “XBMC” v2.0.0 in 2006 and Linux support in 2007. As we developed and grew, there were even more stable releases all the way up to the multi-platform “Eden”, and the soon to be released “Frodo”.

The project has continued to evolve, with many changes such as the move from CVS to SVN and now ultimately GITHUB, support for various new platforms and a huge amount of new features, add-ons and beautiful skins.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and commitment to XBMC over the last 10 years, from the creators, developers, testers, skinners, add-on writers and especially to the users – you are the reason the project was started and without your constant support, we wouldn’t still be here!

Every one of you has made XBMC what it is today and helps us go from strength to strength. We hope you are as excited as we are to see what the next 10 years will bring!

Here’s to the next 10 years!!

This was also posted on our forums, so feel free to discuss there – http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=525&p=4459

Thanks to XPhazer, we have a handy realtime conference chat system set up, using TeamSpeak so that users and developers can chat about the project, and other things. A good way to discuss ideas, as well as get to know other users.

TeamSpeak is a communication system including high quality voice communication, text chat, file sharing with many great features. It is available for all major platforms including Windows, Linux and Android.

Full Instructions and server details

In the last two and a half months there has been a lot of progress with XBMC4XBOX.

This project site has improved, with better integration (visually) of the forum, as well as a brand new bug-tracker at http://redmine.exotica.org.uk/projects/xbmc4xbox which includes all the data from the old Sourceforge hosted Trac. The restoration of the wiki is currently in progress, thanks to the help from the XBMC team – especially Ned Scott – who has provided us with a full xml dump of their wiki to use as a base for the reconstruction.

The forum is now getting established and currently has 400 members with over 3500 posts. If you haven’t signed up please do – and join in the discussions. You will find a friendly bunch of XBOX enthusiasts, with topics covering skin / python development, XBOX modifications and more. It is also a good place to get help if you are having any troubles installing or using XBMC4XBOX.

Development of the XBMC4XBOX codebase has been ongoing with numerous improvements and the introduction of the Confluence Lite skin to the development builds, which functions much the same as the version shipped with XBMC. Thanks to Jezz X and the XBMC team, as well as XBS for modifying it to work with our code and Dom Dxecutioner for the global search functionality.

If you would like to test any of the bleeding edge code, you can find nightly builds on the download link above. It is recommended to install alongside your current version as there may well be issues that need fixing, but feedback about problems is always welcomed over at the forum.