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i've been a long-time user of XBMC (and sometimes Boxee, but it's full of bugs..), and i wondered: it's open source, it's a stable software, and yet it's not in USC. why?

ushabtay
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2 Answers2

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XBMC is now included in the Ubuntu Software Centre for Ubuntu 12.04.

Linked Question:

  1. How do I install XBMC?
Community
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stragu
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  • Alt, point directly to the source which that articles seems based on? http://xbmc.org/theuni/2012/04/10/xbmc-accepted-into-debian/ – andol Apr 13 '12 at 05:01
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See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=469397 for an in-depth explanation.

Some excerpts:

Which license/issue are you referring to? Last I checked, all these problematic licenses had clauses like "you can't use this for commercial purposes", "you must send us patches upon request", or some other stupid clause like "you must not code on any Monday at 3:05pm in someone else's bedroom".

Even if XBMC were changed to LGPL, BSD, or whatever, I don't see how that will help with the third party code with these other restrictions.

So as far as I know, XBMC is at least distributable. It just unfortunately has some code that contains other restrictions like these nagging non-commercial clauses, which is keeping it from going to main.

Also:

They conflict with the GPL, so they keep it from being uploaded to Debian at all.

The licensing issues have been fixed, but nobody cared to bring it into debian since then. Ubuntu is mostly build on debian packages.

cweiske
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  • Launchpad question opened: https://answers.launchpad.net/xbmc/+question/177432 and i'm planning to bring it up as a bug as well.. thanks for all the comments – ushabtay Nov 03 '11 at 18:13