[keith]

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.

I've read most of them (GPL, MIT, BSD) and none of them have non-commerical clauses. All of them operate in the same manner as ours, with the exception of since we own our trademark, we can choose what is done with it, outside of just the code. Mozilla does this with Firefox, for example.

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.

Yes, content owners, other streaming companies, etc. The 'Youtuber creators' are the ones who bring in 'we are destroying their livelihood' and keep pointing out 'they live off this income'. As I stated before, if they weren't promoting stuff we didn't approve, we'd be happy and help them in anyway we can for living the dream, being able to support yourself with our software doing what you love. I think all of us dream to do that. They talked Kodi up in a very singular context: to steal media.

And they can continue to do that, just without using the word Kodi. We aren't trying to police the internet, or tell others what to do. Simply restricting how others use *our own brand* that we own a trademark on.

The middle ground has already been stated. They have to fork, rebrand entirely, or not associate our brand with piracy addons. It's that simple. The guidelines are already laid out. Disclosures don't mean anything. When's the last time you read an EULA? People don't pay attention to those things. We could do what targetin1080p suggests and partner with all the media companies to do much worse things, but that's counterproductive to our goal, plus sounds like a massive timesink, worse than this already is.

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.

You're right, its much better! If the people who want stuff for free will use their fork, and we will get actual people interested in helping ours. As targetin1080p said in his video in the other post, nobody watching that video has donated anyways, because those users don't respect the work we've put in. The attitudes of entitlement we've received from people like Soloman and Husham have made it clear.

TVAddon's fork seems to be working fine, I assume. I don't know though, because I *never read anything about it* and that is exactly where we want the youtubers to go. If this involves 'splitting the community' well these are not contributors members to the community here anyways, and not people we care about being 'split off'. They should go partner with them, since their goals/ideals/etc seem, from this point of view, seem to be aligned.

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

As many before me have pointed out, the burden is the loss of reputation, brand, burden on our moderators and general annoyances and super time consuming. I help with the ATV4 port in iOS sub-forum for example, and we delete more posts than we respond to which are legitimate posts, because nobody reads anything. They see a tutorial that says KODI and GENESIS, and expect it to work everywhere Kodi does, even on a brand new platform that's barely up and running.

I've spent easily 50h+ on this issue alone since this post started. That's how its costing me personally, plus many other team members time. And this is only the tip of the iceburg in measuring the cost of damages.

Go look through the Garbage Bin if you want to see an example of how much time is wasted. I can't even bear to look at the Android sub-forum, because it's the worst offender of them all.