[RobotTwo]

Greetings all,

We at the Zeppelin Project have been using XBMC for quite a while now on our home XBoxes and more recently on our Linux PC’s. And, we’ve got to say that we are extremely excited at the latest development work going on in the Linux port! We agree with your (collective) thinking that Linux support is a great way to get XBMC in front of even more end users as well as developers.

The Zeppelin Project is a foundation with the goal of encouraging and rewarding open source projects. The majority of our developers have been working with OSS software for years, and have collectively contributed to many projects (including the Linux kernel, amongst others). Our founders are big fans of OSS in general, and Linux in particular.

We appreciate how difficult it can be to manage a community project of the XBMC scale – which speaks extremely well to the success, code maturity, and general level of quality that XBMC demonstrates. Our hats are off to all the current and past contributors of the XBMC project.

In fact, we have decided to actively contribute at an organizational level. Specifically, we would like to contribute to the Linux port of XBMC, and we are working out exactly what the best way is to do that.

You can expect to hear more from us in the coming days and weeks. If you’ve got ideas on how we can be of service, please feel free to drop me a line.

Sincerely,
Dan at zeppelinproject dot org

[yuvalt]

Thanks for the positive feedback.

I was hoping to read more at your web site but found little info. Who funds Zeppelin Project and what other projects are rewarded by Zeppelin? How do you usually "contribute at an organizational level"?

[Bram77]

Great news and well deserved compliments. It's incredible how you guys (and girls) manage to keep things organized.

[Gamester17]

Thank you for the positive feedback.

I will e-mail you to hear you out.

[RobotTwo]

Sorry, we were having some DNS problems with our web site at at time. It should be cleared up now, and you can see our (even more information-bare) site at http://www.zeppelinproject.org

To answer your questions, our primary benefactors consist of consultants who assist companies in the implementation of Open Source software. There are many organizations which have the desire to use OSS software but whom don’t have any experience doing so themselves. A simple example might be that a consultant helps a company set up Apache with LDAP authentication against Microsoft Active Directory for a company’s intranet site. The Zeppelin Project was created as an independent organization with the goal of helping Open Source projects which may of interest to any of the end clients.

To anticipate your next question, We feel that XBMC might be of interest to a variety of different end users, including those in the hotel, airline, video conferencing, digital signage, and local and college TV station industries.

There are several ways in which we can contribute to a project, depending on many factors:

• We can provide donations
  
• We can contribute source code
  
• We can sponsor bounties
  
• We can sponsor developers
  

We’re currently working out the best options which will most help you (collectively) to improve XBMC, help us to complete features which will help our benefactors, and of course which works within our budget.

[WinterFool]

call me cynical - but it sounds like "here is $50 - can you developers now build me a free content distribution system for my airport?"

happy to be proved wrong though.

[rodalpho]

So whats the problem with that? Opensource developers tend to work on stuff they're interested in, which can lead to pretty obvious deficiencies on stuff that's not "fun" to do, like writing docs and UI. Getting paid should go a long way to helping with that. XBMC is open so any enhancements would be available to everybody.

It's win/win, if they're for real. The website isn't encouraging.

[WinterFool]

I don't want to speak out of turn since of course it is all up to team xbmc (so I mean no disrespect and please take it as such)

I was just wondering if these guys are doing something like the equivalent offering a $50 candy in front of a problem that will cost 1000 man hours and may not necessairily be aligned with the goals of xbmc ie: a commercial playback device as opposed to a home media center.

Googling "zeppelin project" turns up nada and their website is bare. Actions speak louder than words but all I see so far is - what I believe the US phrase is "blowing smoke up my ass"

If they can contribute code and cash and encourage work that makes team xbmc happy then that of course would be awesome.