[coremailrx8]

1. Incorrect. Kodi doesn't care if ANYONE ships with any of their software for commercial purposes, as long as they follow the trademark policy, which states you must ship unaltered binaries from kodi.tv or google play OR you rebrand. That's it. It's very clear.

You want to load a preinstalled addon, even one from our repo? All branding of Kodi must be removed, and you have to call it something else.

For example: tvaddons forked and created TVMC, following the trademark policy guidelines. I'm sure it's probably happened, but i personally haven't seen single messages on twitter/fb/forum confusing TVMC with Kodi. Ever. And even though they focus on the exact same addons as others use, since they're not using the Kodi trademark, as long as they comply to the GPL (and continue complying to Kodi's trademark policy) what they are doing is completely in their right. And we appreciate the respect they've given us by not using our brand.

Other commercial forks that we have never had a problem with: Plex, Boxee.

OK, so the only difference that I can tell with what I originally said, is that you don't mind them making a profit with the vanilla version of Kodi while it carries the name Kodi. I was actually referring to "most" open sources licenses I have read, not Kodi's, so that's nice of you that you don't mind someone else commercialize your unaltered software.

Anyway, you are on your right, and manufacturers should respect that. Hope you guys are successful quelling these manufacturers.

3. They did not try to work it out with the foundation at all. Soloman only reached out to us *after* promoting his 'kodi magazine' all over the internet, and initially said if we did not agree with letting him use the kodi name, he would shut the entire project down, then immediately went back on his word once we said no. And repeatedly promised to remove content, some of which is still up to this day. Husham and joenobody has never contacted anyone from the foundation that I am aware of. I have the entire email threads on how we were treated by Soloman.

I would love to see transcripts of them trying to 'work it out' with Kodi and how they were backstabbed. I have mine.

Like I said, I didn't know if they were telling the truth or not, just conveying what they claimed in their video conference.

We don't care who profits off our work. That was never the point. The Kodi Team's stance is, if you are profiting in a way that hurts or harms others, you're harming Kodi, so please don't do that

What do you mean by "others"? Content Providers? The aforementioned Youtube creators are not providing the content. They mostly talked up Kodi (pre-this drama). They are indeed promoting pirated content addons, and that does misrepresent kodi as the gateway drug, hence damaging the brand. I fully understand this. It is my opinion the team should be leaving the "how much they make" argument out of the discussion. It should be solely about how they are damaging the brand and focus on that. There should be a middle ground here to work with them. I am not lobbying for them, but I doubt you will be able to stop them. Force them to make a few disclosures and stick to some guidelines will probably help.

I doubt, despite their coup, that they can further develop their fork independently. They will keep forking your latest stable version, which i find it worse, as you would do most of the heavy lifting, while they split the user base and directly profiting from your hard work, which is a total different dynamic from the current situation.

I know support is a concern, but if something is "unsupported", then how is it costing you besides the heavier traffic of tweets.

We appreciate all the work everyone who's contributes to this project positively has done, and we appreciate ways people have extended the platform. We are not removing python (which would be the death of ALL 3rd party addons, and we could easily do if we wanted) but we are considering other manners in which we can lessen the impact of the 'community' that has latched onto using brand for purposes we don't wish to be associated with.

And we, the end users appreciate all the time and effort all of you guys do to provide this awesome piece of software, FOR FREE!!!!!!.


Edit: deleted last sentences, my last question was answered above.