[mythtv-users] Commercial releases of MythTV?

Aaron Stewart acs at hourglassone.com
Fri Mar 19 13:46:17 EST 2004


I need to preface this by saying (as I have not yet), Go for it D1 --
I'm glad you got it working, and I wish you success.

That being said, it would be great if they could give credit where
credit is due -- put a heavier mention on their site of MythTV (if for
no other reason than to get some business off of people doing a search
for it on Google), encourage people to check out the project site,
contribute, whatever.  

On a more disappointed note, I noticed that their bundled "source" does
not include a.) A copy of the GPL, b.) A copy of the source for
mythfilldatabase (it's compiled, and that's all you get), c.) any
makefiles, d.) configure scripts, e.) any source file from mythtv that
they haven't modified.

In other words, it appears (at a glance) as though they've just included
source files that they've modified to suit their needs, excluding the
rest from their bundle, with no logical way of building short of
recreating makefiles from scratch.  I *think* that this is fine legally,
and that they've made an effort to be compliant with the GPL, and
despite a few glaring issues, I'm sure we could let it go.

Unless, of course, one of the mythtv project primaries wants to drop
them a note and give them a headsup and thank you.. Might go a long way
toward developer relations.

Cheers..
Aaron

On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 10:19, steve at nexusuk.org wrote:
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> On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Stelios Valavanis wrote:
> 
> > i'm surprised nobody from D1 has chimed in here. i think commercial efforts 
> > are a big boost to mythtv (and all open source efforts) even if they don't 
> > contribute funds though they should.
> 
> I fully agree that commercial systems running MythTV are a Good Thing.  
> However, it would be nice for D1 to post to the lists using their own 
> domain name in the email addresses or clearly signing the messages so that 
> everyone here can see what contributions they're making.  IMHO if they are 
> seen to be contributing then there should be no bad feelings from either 
> side.
> 
> I do, however, believe that there is a difference between _building upon_ 
> some software to make a product (e.g. if you sell a web-based 
> product that run's on Apache) and actually using some software _as_ the 
> product.  In the case of Myth, I would consider it to be a end user 
> product itself rather than being the building block for another product, 
> and I would argue that in that case it is not right to completely strip 
> out the Myth branding (maybe they should leave a small MythTV logo in the 
> corner of the theme).
> 
> Just my 2 eurocents worth :)
> 
> On another note, does anyone know what D1 are using to provide the 
> listings?  Are they scraping some site with xmltv or are they providing 
> the listings themselves?
> 
> - -- 
> 
>  - Steve                                             http://www.nexusuk.org/
> 
>      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence
> 
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