[Sam.Nazarko]

Alright, everyone be quiet and sit down. It's story time:

For some reason the OpenELEC guys and Sam don't get along. I think a lot of it has to do with Sam being a little paranoid and, no offense, but his young age (at least years ago when this all started), but there are plenty of times where OpenELEC guys stirred things up when they didn't need to. This spills over to Team XBMC/Kodi because there are a bunch of people who work on both projects.

This gets bigger when the Raspberry Pi comes out and Sam uses a more marketable name (RaspBMC) and thus gets more media coverage than OpenELEC. Is it fair? No. But I don't think Sam did that to manipulate anyone. It's a fairly standard naming convention in the open source world. It sure got under OE's skin, though.

At the same time, Sam seems to think OE people are trying to sabotage him. Things like removing CrystalHD, which had nothing to do with OE or Crystalbuntu. Fun fact, sraue was not in favor of dropping CHD this when Davilla proposed it. (Personally, I think assuming that the ATV1 is outdated garbage just because it can't run the latest codecs is nonsense, but I'm not going to force anyone to work on something they don't want to. It's their time and effort.)

So this goes on and on and things are said and now both groups feel extremely irritated (to say the least) at the other. Neither side are bad people, and I wish they would all get over themselves. We all have flaws, we've all said stupid shit in the past. Get over it. Stop taking every chance you can to snip at each other.

People who post in the hardware forum are not going to buy this. It's the same deal as that other stacking freescale HTPC that wants to make a game cartridge slot (I can't even remember the name). We're bargain hunters who will push our grandmothers over in order to get $5 off on something.

Some people will. Some people will think it's a fair price, a reasonable price for the goods and services they get in return. If this helps fund Sam and his project into the future, I think that's great, and I think over time he'll lower prices because he no longer has that initial start up cost. I don't know if it will turn into a long term business for him, but he's young, he's got energy, and I think he should go for it.

We, here in this forum, know that this $200 price is to cover those startup costs. We know that we can get the same thing for half the price and it will probably be just as supported. Maybe, maybe not. I can't tell the future. I can say that the market is huge for these devices, and there's room for OSMC to try. Is it a cubox-i painted white? Well, yeah, it is. Will I buy it? No.

Everyone needs to be less bothered by what someone else is doing. Of course, I can say this easily because I have no bone in this fight. I really like people in both groups. But on other matters, I'm often no better, and I get mad at what other people do. So when I say "everyone", I still include myself.



What everyone should focus on is that Freescale processors are awesome, and it's awesome to see more people use them. They're one of the most open and well documented ARM processors for open source software (if I understand correctly). Everybody wins.

Good post Ned.

There is a fair amount of truth in your post and though I certainly don't agree with everything you've said, I do appreciate the tone and the call for more civil discourse. Sorry Stephan, I wrongly thought that CrystalHD's demise had something to do with the OpenELEC team. To explain, Kodi's wiki for Raspberry Pi had OpenELEC as the only entry until it was edited to list other distributions. I assumed from this that the OpenELEC team had in turn some say in Kodi's roadmap. My bad. I don't think there is any need for any continued animosity between us.

Sam