2016-01-09, 14:39
(This post was last modified: 2016-01-09, 14:43 by natethomas.)
Also, while I've already done this many times, I'll do it again, because I'm sure Robotica's weird stuff is going to rub off on others, who will want to know.
I'll explain the Foundation, to the best of my knowledge and ability.
6 years ago (or so, don't quote me on the exact timeline) XBMC started getting a lot of money in donations. In this situation, a lot meant like $15k a year or something. The Foundation was set up purely so Team XBMC could have a legal means of holding it and using it for things Team XBMC wanted to do.
Today, that's still pretty much the entire purpose and outcome of the Foundation. I know this, because I am currently the president of the foundation and have been one of five board members for something like 4 years. So I know exactly how much power the Foundation has: None, except that granted to it by Team Kodi.
The board actively dislikes making decisions, and so virtually all Foundation decisions are either punted and not decided on at all, or voted on by the entire membership, which, for all intents and purposes, means the entirety of Team Kodi.
The only goal of the Foundation is to earn enough money each year to pay for the things it is expected to pay for: attendance at conventions, DevCon, team t-shirts maybe, and hardware when necessary to further development. All other decisions and goals do not come from the Foundation, they come from Team Kodi, because, as stated, the board hates making decisions.
Team Kodi hates being affiliated with crappy piracy addons for all sorts of reasons. Not purely because the team wants Kodi to be known as a media player rather than an acquirer of content, but also because crappy piracy addons are terrible and break all the time, and the addon authors never have to provide support or feel the repercussions of their shoddy work. We get to receive all that heat ourselves.
Team Kodi hates the fact that people on Amazon and eBay are making money hand over fist selling these pirate boxes, because they are low quality, sellers aren't transferring knowledge to buyers, and it makes it much harder for Kodi to A) get more and better addons from actual real content makers, and B) be taken seriously enough to be on our maximum number of hardware platforms given our technical requirements (see Amazon kerfuffle from this summer).
None of that is coming from the Foundation, because the only real goal of the Foundation is to assist the team financially in whatever it wants to do, which mostly means pay for travel and hardware when necessary. The Team does also want the Foundation to try to stamp out all the sellers effectively giving our software a bad name with shoddy software, and the Foundation has been given authority by the team to try using the trademark the Foundation owns to do this.
As far as I can tell, that's it. In the four or so years that I've been one of five voting board members, paying for stuff and issuing the occasional (mostly ignored) takedown notices is pretty much the only thing the Foundation has done. Oh, we've also had the occasional t-shirt sale. If you want a t-shirt, you can buy one today! Every other major decision has been made collectively by Team Kodi.
.......
A few points against weird things Robotica had to say:
Distributing pirated addons inside software named Kodi, a trademark owned by the XBMC Foundation, is 100% in the realm of the Foundation, given the foundation is the one that owns the name.
I have genuinely no idea what conflicts of interest Robotica is talking about. Perhaps this would have been a good point if he'd actually listed one or two or a few, but he failed to list any, so there's no way to rebutt this point.
I've already posted all the Foundation documents. Articles of Incorporation don't get updated very frequently or possibly at all. I've never personally heard of an org updating them.
Back in 2009, when the articles of incorporation were written, the Team thought the foundation would own the code, but didn't understand that to own the code you have to have the copyright owner sign it over. So instead the code is owned by hundreds if not thousands of individuals and the Foundation does very little in relation to the code. Instead, Team Kodi makes all practical decisions with regards to things like who gets write access on Github. The Foundation manages trademarks at the behest of the team.
The word "clearly" is a word used by a person who is bullshitting and doesn't know whether something is true or not. There is, as far as I know, no other reason to use the word.
The bylaws don't have a 1a. You are speaking of the Articles of Incorporation.
The Foundation is fine and does not stink, because its only purpose is to pay for the furthering of Team Kodi's nonprofit goals and to manage IP like trademarks, and it performs those functions perfectly correctly.
Finally everything in that last post... man, we take things pretty literally here. That post sounded weird and faintly stalker-ish. I would genuinely be uncomfortable meeting the person who wrote that in real life. Perhaps in the future you could write in a way where you aren't talking about your clones and killing yourself.