The XBMC Foundation was established as a non-profit entity on January 16, 2009. Since then we haven’t really released much information about the Foundation. We know this is something that comes up occasionally in the forums and there is a great deal of misleading information being passed around, so let me try and tackle a few of the more common questions.

Why do we need the Foundation?

The Foundation has been incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit, US based organization in order to ensure that the XBMC project continues to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers. The reason for its existence is to promote XBMC and open-source software in general, ensure the vision of the XBMC Team as a whole remains in place, and allow us to collect donations, sponsorship and funding from a variety of sources in a safe and legal manner. It also ensures that the XBMC project remains independent of any commercial ventures that may make use of the codebase.

Essentially the foundation gives certainty moving forward and provides a legal entity with which donations can be accepted so that individuals don’t have to handle donation monies.

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At this year’s DevCon we took a long hard look our development process; we decided that while it works, it is starting to show a few cracks and we know we can do better.

We have a lot of issues with the current development model, mostly due to a lack of communication between developers prior to committing to mainline. This makes mainline more unstable than it needs to be; as churning of commits (initial commit, fix, re-fix, fix builds etc.) takes place. Instead, development in separate branches prior to commit, with sign-off and peer review from the developers who are active in the particular code area will reduce this churn and increase code quality of each commit. Currently we’re reviewing after the fact, rather than before, which clearly is not good practice. Git makes it easier to do review beforehand, so hopefully better tools will lead to better practices.

For those interested in how XBMC is developed, please read on.

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It has been a few weeks since the annual XBMC Developers Conference (DevCon) took place and we thought it was about time that we gave you some feedback about what took place.  What follows is a rundown of what happened at DevCon, who the sponsors for the event were, a brief discussion about sponsors, and a list of ideas and thoughts that were discussed at length during the course of our time together.

This year we were fortunate enough to be hosted by at-visions at Hotel Fabrik in Vienna, Austria. at-visions where truly wonderful hosts and did everything they could to make this a great weekend for everyone that attended. I think I can safely say that everyone from XBMC thanks them for their hospitality and we wish them well with everything they are doing.

This year’s DevCon was possibly the largest to date with a total of 24 people attending over the weekend – a true reflection of how the project has grown over the years.

Team XBMC and our hosts

Hover over faces to see names

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