I was recently invited to the boxee (Flash warning) alpha test. Currently the only free platform they support is Ubuntu GNU/Linux, but they do offer unsupported source code download. Unfortunately attached to the download page was a license agreement which, among other things, prevented redistribution and modification of the code. Normally this isn’t really a big deal, I would just boycott the software, but boxee is based off XBMC which is licensed under the GNU GPL and so boxee is obliged to release their modifications under the same license. The license agreement on the site (and in the ./license/ directory in the source code) violated the GPL, and so is against the law.
I started a thread on the subject and emailed boxee with my complaints, after a lengthy argument discussion on the forum I received a reply from boxee expressing their sincerest apologies on the matter and told me the error will be fixed in a matter of days. They then proceeded to make a public apology in my forum thread. I am mightily suprised and impressed with their response, and wish that other companies in the same situation would handle GPL violations in the same way.
That wasn’t the end of the problems though, I have yet to be able to compile it on my x86 Gentoo box. I will be submitting a patch when I do.
