[ultraman]

OSMC (Open Source Media Center): Is it really open source? Doesn't just use open source + some extra sauce not available back to public?

[Sam.Nazarko]

OSMC (Open Source Media Center): Is it really open source? Doesn't just use open source + some extra sauce not available back to public?

I assume you're referring to the discussion re. implementing DRM.

Unfortunately we can't make that solution open source, but we can keep everything else open.
But even if this was open, it wouldn't make much of a difference, as the appropriate licensing is still necessary to gain access and decode these streams successfully.

[AdamG]

I assume you're referring to the discussion re. implementing DRM.

Unfortunately we can't make that solution open source, but we can keep everything else open.
But even if this was open, it wouldn't make much of a difference, as the appropriate licensing is still necessary to gain access and decode these streams successfully.

I think he was referring to the fact that OSMC is not 'open' in that it openly violates the GPL license by distributing Linux 4.9 kernel, u-boot and Kodi binaries and not making the source code publically available.

[ultraman]

I think he was referring to the fact that OSMC is not 'open' in that it openly violates the GPL license by distributing Linux 4.9 kernel, u-boot and Kodi binaries and not making the source code publically available.

Yes, I meant this.

[User 182116]

I assume you're referring to the discussion re. implementing DRM.

Unfortunately we can't make that solution open source, but we can keep everything else open.
But even if this was open, it wouldn't make much of a difference, as the appropriate licensing is still necessary to gain access and decode these streams successfully.

I think he was referring to the fact that OSMC is not 'open' in that it openly violates the GPL license by distributing Linux 4.9 kernel, u-boot and Kodi binaries and not making the source code publically available. 

This would seem to be a very serious legal issue if it is the case and I think it vital that Sam.Nazarko provide an adequate response, especially being a Team Kodi member.

The Kodi team have, over the years of it's existence have rightfully rejected and refuted any affiliation with anything considered illegal and the mere mention of a banned addon or link to copyright theft is immediately and efficiently dealt with.

As such, this is a matter that requires a complete and satisfactory answer to the community in order that the very name of Kodi, unfairly vilified in the press and wider media but staunchly protected both internally and externally by team and users alike, is not allowed to be associated with any act that violates law or agreement pursuant to the conditions applicable to them.

Allowing such behaviour (subject to actual confirmation) would open Kodi to a more reasonable scrutiny and criticism, arming those that would seek any avenue to take action to shut it down.

Looking at the OSMC site, it states boldly "OSMC is a free and open source media center built for the people, by the people."

That seems like a very clear statement regarding it's open source nature (and obligations to?)

[Sam.Nazarko]

I assume you're referring to the discussion re. implementing DRM.

Unfortunately we can't make that solution open source, but we can keep everything else open.
But even if this was open, it wouldn't make much of a difference, as the appropriate licensing is still necessary to gain access and decode these streams successfully.

I think he was referring to the fact that OSMC is not 'open' in that it openly violates the GPL license by distributing Linux 4.9 kernel, u-boot and Kodi binaries and not making the source code publically available.                   

This is a very serious accusation. I note that you and @ultraman are both CoreELEC developers. You've also stated that we are violating the GPL  on your own website here. To my understanding, you can't really say someone is violating the GPL when you haven't even asked for the sources or verified that they are not available already. 

You seem to be suggesting that we are withholding kernel sources for 3D MVC output. Our 3.14 release, which has commit history on GitHub have earlier versions of these 3D enablement patches. Why would we publicly release them last Summer if our intention was to then withhold them?

Because the Vero is a sold, physical product and the software is not downloaded, we make the written offer for GPLv2 compliance. A customer can then request GPLv2 sources, although they are available online anyway.

We have always complied with the GPL license and have made 4.9 kernel sources available whenever requested in the past, e.g. here 
Providing these sources in a manual manner is exhausting, which is why as promised here, we said we would take steps to automate the publication of 4.9 kernel source code with new builds. That is ready.

The complete 4.9 kernel source is therefore obtainable via apt-get or using a web browser. This will give you the kernel sources in tarball form. 
The UBoot source for the stable version is found here on GitHub. However there are some new changes which can be found here until they are published to GitHub when stable and we have approval to publish Git history (there are Restriction on Distribution clauses for Git history in some of the SLAs). 

The Kodi changes for the stable version are found here on GitHub. For 4.9 builds, we have some further changes which have not been merged yet for stability reasons. You can find them here. We will keep maintaining the code there until it merges in to OSMC upstream when stable.

It is in our interests to make these sources as easily available as possible to encourage others to develop and improve OSMC. For example, a significant number of improvements have come from a recent user who is now a developer.

OSMC operates an open first policy where if a new software project or development can be open source, it is open source.

Conversely you seem to do the opposite - your eMMC installation scripts and BL301 injection tool are closed source. There is no reason for them to need to be as you authored them yourselves and are not restricted or bound by any previous licenses. It seems you are only concerned about licenses to cause issues with other projects. You did this with LibreELEC, claiming their use of the fakeroot package violated licenses and now you are claiming that we are violating the GPLv2 when we never denied any request for source code. It seems you are intentionally using GPLv2 and proprietary licenses to maximise the source code you can get access to for your project and restrict the amount of access others can get to your own works. Further, you frequently force push branches in what seems to be yet a further attempt to make it hard to discern changes between builds. This is not in the spirit of open source. Your sources web page only seems to host closed source binaries and no source code at all. To this day, you still base your 3.14 kernel which has thousands of users on one of our 3.14 trees. We are happy to share and collaborate. We have improved HDR and multi-channel audio for example and you then claim on your forum that we give nothing back to the open source community. This is wrong.

I have archived your statements and reserve the right to submit them in to the record.

You have been provided with direct access to all the sources. If you have any questions you can contact me and you know my contact details. Now that is out of the way, we should get back to what this topic is about which is the playback of 3D MVC content on Vero hardware. I don't think anything more needs to be said.

[hdmkv]

Not that I want to get in the middle of this (love both CoreELEC and Vero/OSMC), but have wondered if more AMLogic-based devices could support 3D MVC as it appears the h/w is capable?

[bdreams]

Not that I want to get in the middle of this (love both CoreELEC and Vero/OSMC), but have wondered if more AMLogic-based devices could support 3D MVC as it appears the h/w is capable?

First hats off to sam and the team that took the time to bring 3D to his platform. Dont know the back story of the 3D on other platform but almost everyone has put 3D in the dead zone. So if the osmc team has kept it alive they got my support at the end of the day we are all here to learn and help each other.

[AdamG]

It's a very serious allegation that I stand by, for why I will outline below.

1) The user heiko was one of our team members, the link you provided to them was purposefully restricted to 1KB/s with Apache mod_limit and this is something that our entire team would verify as everybody tried the link that you made available, each subsequent thread was also limited to 1KB/s and so we know it wasn't a connection issue, we also have archived screenshots of this for the record.

2) The almost 2GB kernel source file that you made available was padded with 200MB of deb files and a single 1.5GB junk file of random data to increase its size and along with 1) for the purposes of obtaining the kernel sources painfully difficult, again we have archive screenshots of this for the record. By comparison a copy of the kernel source code with history removed and compressed is only 150MB, not 2GB.

3) Email requests for source code have gone unanswered.

By virtue of the above then it should be considered that you was purposefully making it hard to obtain kernel sources, you can not say you stand by the GPL and adhere to it when you are engaging in such tactics, when a user makes a written offer for the GPL and you make it available to them at 1KB/s and pad the file with useless data then that is not in the community spirit of being open and this to me does not seem to be adhering to the GPL license requirements, alas to say requiring a written request is also a bad and unusual practice that no other Kodi related community project requires.

I am not suggesting that you are withholding sources for 3D MVC, but users asking for 3D MVC has brought the issue up again for our team, not a single one of us has a display capable of outputting 3D and so it is not something that we are acutely interested in, one of our developers (cdu13a) was more interested in your bring-up of gxl on the 4.9 kernel to better improve his own funhouse builds, meanwhile the rest of us was curious as to whether you had used any of our work.

The inject_bl301 and ceemmc tool is not my work, nor do I have access to it, the developer has chosen not to make these available to tackle GPL violators, mainly AlexELEC, they have no bearing on your project as you provide your own bootloader and internal install method. As for our history of force-pushing this is just bad developmental practice and has nothing to do with hiding anything, the accusation that we do it to make it hard to discern changes is hilariously absurd and couldn't be further from the truth, we do this as we work live and often small mistakes are made that are rectified almost immediately. This and our history with LE is irrelevant as this thread is about OSMC.

You can claim as much as you want. The fact is we publish source before releasing any public binary builds. You do not. Your build is up until January? Unless you provide code then your word is worth nothing.

When you provide source code in a tarball format then this is no good to anybody and any good developer knows this, this is not helping the community.

I welcome and look forward to the day that you make all of your sources available on GitHub.

[Sam.Nazarko]

It's a very serious allegation that I stand by, for why I will outline below.

1) The user heiko was one of our team members, the link you provided to them was purposefully restricted to 1KB/s with Apache mod_limit and this is something that our entire team would verify as everybody tried the link that you made available, each subsequent thread was also limited to 1KB/s and so we know it wasn't a connection issue, we also have archived screenshots of this for the record.

2) The almost 2GB kernel source file that you made available was padded with 200MB of deb files and a single 1.5GB junk file of random data to increase its size and along with 1) for the purposes of obtaining the kernel sources painfully difficult, again we have archive screenshots of this for the record. By comparison a copy of the kernel source code with history removed and compressed is only 150MB, not 2GB.

3) Email requests for source code have gone unanswered.

By virtue of the above then it should be considered that you was purposefully making it hard to obtain kernel sources, you can not say you stand by the GPL and adhere to it when you are engaging in such tactics, when a user makes a written offer for the GPL and you make it available to them at 1KB/s and pad the file with useless data then that is not in the community spirit of being open and this to me does not seem to be adhering to the GPL license requirements, alas to say requiring a written request is also a bad and unusual practice that no other Kodi related community project requires.

I am not suggesting that you are withholding sources for 3D MVC, but users asking for 3D MVC has brought the issue up again for our team, not a single one of us has a display capable of outputting 3D and so it is not something that we are acutely interested in, one of our developers (cdu13a) was more interested in your bring-up of gxl on the 4.9 kernel to better improve his own funhouse builds, meanwhile the rest of us was curious as to whether you had used any of our work.

The inject_bl301 and ceemmc tool is not my work, nor do I have access to it, the developer has chosen not to make these available to tackle GPL violators, mainly AlexELEC, they have no bearing on your project as you provide your own bootloader and internal install method. This and our history with LE is irrelevant as this thread is about OSMC.

You can claim as much as you want. The fact is we publish source before releasing any public binary builds. You do not. Your build is up until January? Unless you provide code then your word is worth nothing.

When you provide source code is a tarball format then this is no good to anybody and any good developer knows this, this is not helping the community.

I welcome and look forward to the day that you make all of your sources available on GitHub.

This is patently false and sounds ludicrous. 

The user received the source code and verified that it was source code, not 'junk data'. That source code is also available here as well http://apt.osmc.tv/pool/main/v/vero364-s...13-20-osmc and it is up to date. It is mirrored across a number of geographical locations and should be downloadable on any connection promptly and anyone can verify that here. The file is about 120MB as it does not contain debug binaries. The user initially had some issues downloading the files because he was using some kind of proxy / VPN. I provided the source code via a different server at the time when the user requested this and explained that in the future, source would be published to APT directly, which it now is. 

We have not received any email requests for source code whatsoever. You have also stated on your forum that you have not requested any sources: "No, none of us have contacted him,".
All of the sources are available as outlined in my previous post.
​​​​​​
I have explained that presently it is not possible for us to provide Git history for the kernel due to a legal requirement. This is a work in progress. You know that, which is presumably why you stopped publishing the source code for libamcodec recently, because newer releases from AMLogic have increasing stipulations with regards to redistribution. While it is not ideal -- we are still releasing the source, complying with GPLv2 and working towards making Git history publicly available. You may be publishing to Git repositories, but you are still force pushing and overwriting history, which does not make the repositories significantly useful as you are not using version control properly. It is not significantly different to a tarball drop.

If you are not interested in 3D and you don't believe that we are withholding 3D MVC source code, then I don't understand why you are posting about this in a thread about 3D MVC. You seem intent on de-railing the thread. The sources are available in their entirety for anyone to download and will continue to be. 

I have been working on open source for over 10 years and I've no intention to suddenly start violating the GPLv2 and holding back sources. If I read your last comment correctly, you want us to release all of our sources on GitHub (which we'll do eventually; for now a tarball is the best we can do), but you won't do the same for some of your packages because you're trying to prevent AlexELEC from violating the GPL? So you're trying to prevent someone from violating the GPL by not releasing it as GPL?

[AdamG]

Maybe this will jog your memory?



There was no proxies or VPN in use because as I said our entire team tried it and experienced the same painfully slow download, please don't make us all out to be liars, you know damn right what you did and to suggest otherwise is insulting.

Your excuses for not providing git history is nonsense because you could nuke the Amlogic history and then provide history for all of your own teams commits and additions, there is absolutely nothing what so ever stopping you from doing this. Overwriting history is better than providing none at all which is what you are doing, at least we are providing version history which is more than can be said for OSMC with its 4.9 releases.

You are not helping the community, our users are interested in 3D and that is why I have posted and continue to do so, you are reading between the lines and trying to distract from the point in question as usual Sam. You are deliberately obfuscating your changes so other projects are unable to benefit, seeing as you have benefited from our commits which we see you have used in your kernel then you should do the right thing by the community and just stop this bs.

If you really want to help then the community and give back then you can dump all of your changes as patch files 'git format-patch'.

[Sam.Nazarko]

Maybe this will jog your memory?



There was no proxies or VPN in use because as I said our entire team tried it and experienced the same painfully slow download, please don't make us all out to be liars, you know damn right what you did and to suggest otherwise is insulting.

Your excuses for not providing git history is nonsense because you could nuke the Amlogic history and then provide history for all of your own teams commits and additions, there is absolutely nothing what so ever stopping you from doing this. Overwriting history is better than providing none at all which is what you are doing, at least we are providing version history which is more than can be said for OSMC with its 4.9 releases.

You are not helping the community, our users are interested in 3D and that is why I have posted and continue to do so, you are reading between the lines and trying to distract from the point in question as usual Sam. You are deliberately obfuscating your changes so other projects are unable to benefit, seeing as you have benefited from our commits which we see you have used in your kernel then you should do the right thing by the community and just stop this bs.

If you really want to help then the community and give back then you can dump all of your changes as patch files 'git format-patch'.

This is going nowhere. 

1. I sent your fake account a tarball of my working directory. Whoever was operating that account acknowledged that they got the files and asked how to obtain the latest config for the kernel, and I explained to them how to do so via procfs. This was the latest kernel source at the time.
   
2. The latest kernel source is available online with the link previously posted and anyone can verify that it downloads at a reasonable speed. I remember that this user reported some issues with downloading and we found that this could have been caused by the origin IP address. The download seemed to go through later. I genuinely have no idea why you didn't just send me a message asking for sources and decided to make an account and use proxies instead. 
   
3. I don't understand why you would claim you sent us emails and we didn't send source code, and also say on your forums you made no such requests. I also don't know why you said that we hadn't released kernel sources when by your own admission, you downloaded source code from one of our servers after we provided a link. It sounds like your issue is actually that the code is not provided with Git history. As I have explained, this is being worked on.
   

If you are interested in the changes, you can diff them against the upstream AMLogic source code at the moment.

The AMLogic SLA we have signed currently does not permit the publication of Git commit history for the kernel. We want to be able to publish a full Git repository if we can and I think we should be able to after some discussion with AMLogic. Failing that, we will look in to publish a Git repository on top of a base import commit from the SoC vendor. For now, our focus is on bringing up this kernel and we are providing full kernel sources via tarballs. Therefore, this is not a GPL violation. You also have the changes needed to implement 3D support for your platform, and these even have commit history (from the 3.14 repository).

[clarkss12]

This is from AdamG and all his surrogates that will attack you if you say something they don't like on their forum........

[Klojum]

The thread portion has been split off due to going off-topic.

[AdamG]

Are you just being wilfully ignorant now or just purposefully difficult? I never asked you for the Amlogic history, do you not think we already have this and have ascertained the commit head of your kernel?

Diffing your changes between the head of the Amlogic kernel is useless and doesn't help us or the community when the resulting patch is thousands of lines and the mere fact you are suggesting this in public is embarrassing and not a good look on OSMC.

It would take you all of 2s to dump the commits into patch files and put all of this to rest and show how you are giving back to the community .