[mythtv-users] Legality of selling MythTV and its Components?
Andrew Cope
andrew at evergreencomputing.com
Wed May 3 19:59:27 UTC 2006
Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> I wish a lawyer would speak up on these issues. Currently it looks like
> a lot of people
> have it partially right, but nobody is declaring themselves a lawyer, so
> it's all noise in the end.
>
> Still, this has been a good thread for me. I'm planning to sell mythtv
> hardware to the mythtv
> community (if you will buy it), and I don't think I'll include an OS
> with the hardware at this
> point. Perhaps I'll start an open source project to host the OS and link
> to instructions for
> installing it, or perhaps I'll link to an existing OS project and forget
> about the software altogether.
>
> I would LIKE to ship with an OS, either on a CD, or on Flash already,
> but this thread has
> scared me away from that course of action.
>
> Either way, my business model will be retail hardware sales ONLY. I
> don't expect to get
> rich off it. I know it's a relatively poor model. It's just an extension
> of my hobby and it
> would be nice to support my mythtv hardware addiction by actually making
> a small profit
> and getting some business experience in the process. I certainly do NOT
> want to get sued
> though. That would totally defeat the purpose of the venture.
>
> I hope Brian Woods and a few others who have vehemently opposed the
> commercialization
> of mythtv won't boycott my products merely because the description
> mentions that it can be
> used with mythtv. I just want to provide inexpensive, pre-assembled
> solutions to the community.
> I don't think there is anything illegal about that.
I think you'll do well selling the following:
- a disk-less and fan-less frontend that will look good under the TV.
Connect to a backend for booting, or boot from flash.
With a DVD/CD slot for playing movies/music (optional).
- a big beastie backend with 2 or 3 (or more!) tuner cards, LVM/RAID
disk storage.
Most people already have the hardware for a general purpose backend, but
to get myth into the front room it has to look good enough to get past
the wife/girlfriend.
I won my wife over with a frontend in the living room *and* in the bedroom.
I put my combined be/fe into a ASUS Pundit-R, but the disk/fan and CPU
fan are noisy. Not too noisy, but enough to notice when the show is
relatively quiet.
My office is right next door to my master bedroom, so I drilled two
holes in the wall: one for the A/V cable and the other for the IR cable.
The result is a totally silent myth front end - it's not even in the room!
Front-ends are difficult as the hardware is specialized, so that should
be enough of a niche to make a business model.
Cheers
Andrew
--
Email: andrew at evergreencomputing.com
Website: http://evergreencomputing.com
Phone: +44 (0)1454 269 087
Fax: +44 (0)8707 515 596
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