[aaronb]

Forgive me, but I am little confused about this PLEX platform that LG will now also be incorporating.

The interface appears to be XBMC running Mediastream Redux.

Is this simply a commercial organization cherry picking features from a FREE & OPEN SOURCE platform and now integrating it into their own product line without any credit having been given to the XBMC team??

So they will be marketing this as THEIR IDEA and garnering huge profits from it??

Many clueless consumers who are none the wiser and had never heard of XBMC might end up thinking that LG has pulled off a great coup over their competitors. And speaking of competitors, what is to stop any other AV manufacuturer from "tweaking" their own version and calling it their own.

This is the aspect of "Open Source" that I have never quite really understood. I am an integrator and in the AV field. I am not from the pooter/IT World.

How exactly did this "PLEX" media server all come about? ((The simple quick and dirty version if anyone would be so kind))

EDIT...

Here is a link to some PLEX PR which I find totally misleading...

http://elan.plexapp.com/

Plex forked from XBMC a long time ago. They've continued to pull some code at times, and for some things they've written their own. The recent release was a significant rewrite of a lot of key features, I'm sure there's still a lot of XBMC code in there, but much less than there used to be. The Plex Media Server was something they rolled out a few versions ago, it is the closed-source backbone for their own custom plug-in engine, used for Plex-specific plugins for Netflix, Hulu, and many other sources of online content.

Plex has never hidden the fact that they were based on XBMC, but they decided to take the program in a different direction. They had different long-term goals, hence the fork. Credit has always been given, and other than a few minor pissing matches here and there it is my understanding that the Plex and XBMC teams have always had an amicable relationship.

As to how LG markets this, and whether other companies would do something similar with XBMC, the code is open source. Nothing is stopping any manufacturer from using it provided they are respecting the relevant licenses. This is not all that dissimilar from what Boxee is doing.