[natethomas]

I saw the WIKI pages. Good start. Is there a place to discuss all this? I would suggest opening a seperate section on the forum to discuss all this.

I'll be honest, after reading that old blog post, I have a great deal of difficulty taking you at all seriously. You spend a lot of time throwing out fairly serious claims, like tax evasion, without knowing the law of those claims. When you say that you worry we are violating the GPL or worry that Boxee is violating the "spirit" of the GPL (whatever that means), you are coming off as a conspiracy theorist, not because you are making serious allegations, but because you clearly don't understand the law, the nature of software licensing, and the nature of non-profit organizations. Yet, regardless of your lack of knowledge of all this publicly available information, you continue to toss out essentially imaginary theories that not only may or may not be true, but also may or may not be legally and morally wrong in the first place.

XBMC is allowing Boxee to violate the SPIRIT of the GPL? The GPL is a simple licensing agreement. There is no "spirit." Either they ARE violating the licensing agreement, or they are not. Everything else is simply made up fantasy land.

I am more than willing to have a conversation about the Foundation. Just a few weeks ago, a student popped onto the forums and asked many questions about the nature of the foundation, and we had a fairly positive chat. I am unwilling to have a conversation about the Foundation, or anything else for that matter, with a person who presumes that a failure to answer or a failure to answer ENOUGH is evidence of malfeasance or poor stewardship or whatever phrase we've picked up this week to nastily put down the developers of software that you claim to really appreciate.

I'm going to ignore most of the more crackpot statements made in your blog, like how XBMC team members are somehow getting rich on donations and evading taxes by hiding behind a non-profit, because they are both lunacy and legally ignorant and therefore not worthy of a reply.

But I will correct a pure falsehood. In your blogpost, you wrote "Mentioned topic made me being banned from their domain to this WordPress-hide out. As you can read, I was banned since teamXBMC doesn’t like the subject of the topic; not because I did something wrong." This is false. Over and over again, you did something wrong. You took a forum thread that was about one topic, and turned it into yet another bitch session about the Foundation. The original poster wanted to talk about discovering XBMC in a hotel? Screw that, you said. I want to talk about how the Foundation is morally corrupt, so I'm stealing your topic and turning into my own topic. Again. And again and again. You have stolen the conversation thread on dozens of topics and twisted it to the only topic that appears to interest you. Your casual disregard of other users has resulted in your being banned.

If you are seriously so concerned about the XBMC Foundation, here is my suggestion to you: stop using XBMC. Don't donate to the Foundation. Don't sing the praises of XBMC. Because you are not a member of the Foundation, you have absolutely zero say in how it is run and how it ought to be run. You lack any conceivable form of standing. The only possible way you can influence the organization is with your wallet. Don't like us? Then don't donate, and don't bring along other people who might donate. That's your option.

From this point forward, if you would like to be a positive member of the community with an interest in the Foundation, then be one. Talk about possible ways in which the foundation can be more open or better. Perhaps we could post a quarterly chart, showing how donations were used, and you could do some research on how one might put together such a chart using the PayPal API. Perhaps you could talk about some interesting new things that some other FLOSS organization is doing and wonder if it might be something XBMC could benefit from emulating. You have a lot of options.

But if you continue to steal the threads of others and write accusing statements against members of the foundation that are based purely in your own fantasyland, then you will be banned immediately and without further warning.