A brief shout out to Gerv Markham
#1
I wasn't really sure where to post this, so I thought I'd post it here. I just found out that Gervase Markham passed away recently. If you don't know who he is, here's his wiki page and here's a nice memorial of him from Bradley Kuhn of Software Conservancy.

I want to mention him because he played a critical role in the renaming of XBMC to Kodi that I think very few people know about. When we took on the Kodi name, we did so partly to be able to police it, in as much as a small organization with hardly any money can police a trademark. To do this, we started by simply grabbing the trademark policy from Mozilla and adapting it as well as we could manage. That move has become a somewhat standard operating procedure for us ever since then. If we do something new, we almost always start by seeing what Mozilla did first.

Anyway, we grabbed their trademark policy, and then out of the blue, Gerv emailed us and offered to help with the language. As he had been working on the Mozilla side, he was pretty familiar with their efforts on the subject and brought up important points and issues they had run into that we hadn't even considered. In the history of XBMC and Kodi, I don't believe a single other person has ever come forward explicitly to help on the legal/business side without any prompting. It was touching, and it was heartily appreciated.

Evidently there's some controversy around Gerv for his political views. I never knew him well enough to have any opinion or insight into that side of things. All I know is that he served as an important piece in the history of Kodi, and I wanted to let other people know about it.
Reply
#2
Thanks Nate, for letting us know.

Sad to hear about he passed away at this young age Sad
Reply
#3
So many unsung hero's in the Kodi legacy, Nate; thanks for the informative tribute, may he RIP.
Reply
#4
Thanks for sharing Nate. 
RIP
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
A brief shout out to Gerv Markham0