Selling hardware bundled with XBMC?

Hello all. First off many thanks to the developers and the latest beta build of XBMC! I am impressed. I now have it running at home on my PC and have several other friends gearing up to do the same. Great work!

My question is related to the legal issue's of selling the capabilities of this program.

I have several clients that have seen my setup at home with XBMC running connected to my home audio / video setup. They are very interested in it and want me to set it up for them. They are willing to pay me to get it done correctly and calibrated on their systems. This of course will take time as I want to put together a nice HTPC system that XBMC runs well on. I will need to test different platforms and find the most stable hardware. Hopefully on a Linux OS where I can direct most of the available resources to XBMC.

I want to make sure that "if" I were to build such hardware and place XBMC on it and sell it to them for a fixed price I am not breaking any open source software laws related to XBMC or even the version of Linux that is running on the backend.

What makes sense to me is to sell them the "hardware package" that I built and explain that XBMC was installed but I am not selling them that part of it. It's free. They are only paying for the box and any service fee's for installing it in their home or business.

Has anyone else dealt with this issue or knows the laws on this? This is a great product and I want to help promote it, but I do not want to cross any lines on software licensing issue's when selling the hardware.

Also would it be allowed if I wanted to also include a FAQ booklet included with the system that explains the basics of XBMC with perhaps screenshots of menus and such that help explain how to use the program? Would I need to include copyright names in the booklet to make sure it's legally correct?

Thanks guys!

I suggest you start by reading these two discussion thread to learn the difference here of XBMC for Xbox and XBMC for Linux/Windows/Mac:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36788
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=30640

Also make sure that you read:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
and:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
and of course also:
http://xbmc.org/legal/

Knowing that MythTV is GPL just like XBMC also see this list of others who sell hardware bundled with a MythTV pre-install and pre-configured;
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Com...hTV_System

My own personal disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor will I take any legal responsibility if you go ahead and sell XBMC pre-installed on a hardware platform, but I will tell you about my own interpretation of the GPL (GPL version 2) that XBMC is distributed under;

First of all, the XBMC Media Center software is free and under the GPL (GPL version 2) license, and even though you may not charge for the XBMC Media Center software itself you can charge for the service of redistributing it and the work you done packaging/bundling it with hardware, packaging and handling, pre-sale and post-sale support, etc.

Note that you must somehow clearly inform your customer openly that the software itself if free under the GPL, do not misrepresent that fact or it could count as fraud. I do not know if you know this or not but remember that most set-top-boxes and also network routers that are sold on on the home and small-office market today contain GPL licensed software, either in the form of Linux based operating-system and/or as applications or services running on the operating-system.

Other than that you also have include a copy of the GPL with your product, and best/simplest is also to include a copy of the full source code of the exact version/revision of XBMC that you pre-installed, (either a copy of the source code on a CD/DVD, or a copy on the harddrive of the box, or provided on your website), important is that it is the full source code of the exact same version/revision of XBMC that you pre-installed. What they usually do in include a printed manual with does contain the GPL and either the source code on a CD/DVD or a link to where a copy can be downloaded on their website, (website download is more common among larger companies and CD/DVD more common among smaller companies).

The XBMC Online Manual and the XBMC Online FAQ are also open sourced, however they not licensed under the GPL but instead currently licesed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike lisence version 3.0, a license which is much more restrictive than the GPL when it come to using the content for commercial purposes, this means that you can not sell the content of it, (we might change the license of the wiki in the future but this it currently the case).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Yes the words "XBMC", "XBMC Media Center" as well as the XBMC logo/logotype are copyrighted so you must abide by that copyright, thus you can not start a company or website called "XBMC Limited", nor advertise that you are official/certified retailer of "XBMC" software, at least not unless we would give you approval to do so, (something that you can not expect us to do as we do not even know you).

So in conclusion, to me you are more than welcomed to make and sell a such XBMC for Linux pre-installed and pre-configured hardware boxes as long as you comply with the GPL and abide by our copyright of the "XBMC" name and logo/logotype. Currently though you may not copy the content of the wiki to use for commercial purposes, (sorry).

I will read the links you mentioned above and follow the guidelines. I do appreciate your help on this.

Nicholas...

Note also, that some of XBMC is released under a dual-license, which will have implications for a commercial entity. In particular, the UPnP library (Platinum) is dual-licensed.

For doing this for a couple of folks, this will not likely be an issue, but should this endeavour expand, you will have to obtain a commercial license, or remove anything to which you no longer have license.

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall Wrote:UPnP library (Platinum) is dual-licensed.

hmm, is any parts/libraries other than libPlatinum in XBMC licensed under a such 'not free for commercial parties' license?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/platinum
http://www.plutinosoft.com/blog/goodies/platinum

Hi Gamester17,

First thank you (and all the other developers) for the XBMC project.

I have a question about what you mentioned above, when you say that a commercial product using XBMC must abide the XBMC copyrights and logos, do you mean by this that we need to leave them "as is" and indicate that they are trademark of the XBMC Project or should we replace all logos and XBMC name instances with our own ?

Also, are the skins licensed under GPL too ?

Thanks !

Yanick

Hello,

Does anyone know if XBMC can be used as an entertainment system for a hospital? The paid solutions don't look very promising until you start getting into the big bucks.

I assume how well it scales will be dependent on how much the audio/video is shrunk down before it is streamed across the network?

Would MythTV be a better solution considering we also want to include free-to -air TV?

Regards
Dan

I would suggest MythTV because it's designed around a front/backend model whereas XBMC is not. Also, as you say, MythTV is designed for live TV whereas XBMC is not.

Thanks theophile, I'll have a look at MythTV then.

I heard of some people using XBMC Media Center this way for hotels, condominium complexes, and such.

XBMC has a MythTV and VDR client so you could just use those, or a hardware solution such as HDHomeRun or Dreambox/Dbox2 as the backend:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Types_of_Media_Sources
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=HDHomeRun
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=TuxBox
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=MythTV
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=45314
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36988

You could alternatively setup VideoLAN to stream to XBMC, see:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=HOW-TO:_Play...et_Streams
and:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=3658
also:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=27503

Using XBMC as the frontend, and then something like HDHomeRun, Dreambox, MythTV, VDR, or VideoLAN as the backend.


For a hospital I would probably look at HDHomeRun first, they are a commercial version of the box as well:
http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun




@theophile, why would you go and recommend something other than XBMC for the frontend?