XBMC DEV CON 2008 will be the first event in which the Team-XBMC developers get a chance to get together face-to-face, meet and greet, discuss XBMC, and maybe get a little coding done as well. After 6 years and with so many users, it is time for the Team-XBMC programmers to get out of the IRC chat-room and meet up in person to talk about the past, present, and future, set priorities and make plans (and yeah, play a few games), and who knows, this may even lead to a XBMC fan convention in the not too distant future.

When and where?
June the 13th, 14th, and 15th in Amsterdam.

Who is boxee?
boxee is a NYC-based start-up company that will soon be offering a social networking multimedia-platform built on-top of XBMC. Much as Red Hat and Firefox are specific businesses that have products built on open source code and open technologies as their framework, boxee’s aim is to bring the core XBMC platform to the mainstream consumer. boxee is fully committed to the growth and success of XBMC and will continue to contribute back upstream to the XBMC code base under the GPL license. boxee is hosting the 2008 DEV CON, and will be going into public alpha testing of their product beginning on the 15th of June 2008. Team-XBMC is very excited to have our code base used in boxee’s product, and we look forward to more people discovering XBMC through boxee. This initiative will hopefully lead others to use XBMC in a similar fashion.

How to get involved:
* Propose ideas for stuff that you would like Team-XBMC to discuss: XBMC Community Forum Discussion
* Meet Team-XBMC for drinks on the evening of June the 14th (details will be posted on the boxee blog)
* Sign up for boxee alpha testing: www.boxee.tv
* Follow boxee progress on the boxee blog: blog.boxee.tv
* Send boxee a Twitter with a comment or question: http://twitter.com/boxee

Signed / Team-XBMC

Elan Fieldgold, a developer on Team-XBMC who was working on the Mac OS X port of XBMC have decided to fork our XBMC for Mac version and go out on his own, quiet the XBMC project, and start a new project with its own community for his fork fork. There have been differences in priorities between Elan and the other members of Team-XBMC for sometime now, and this has come to a head recently. Elan is thus now no longer a member of Team-XBMC and the official XBMC project, and his new project will from now on be hosted and supported elsewhere.

One of the great things about open source is that you are permitted to take the source code of one project and use it in any way you wish (subject to the GPL of course), and we wish Elan and his new project well in their endeavors, and look forward to seeing what they come up with.

We at Team-XBMC will continue to the development and release versions of XBMC for Mac, Linux, Windows, and Xbox, and we will continue to support our XBMC builds on all platforms. As always, any and all help in this regard is greatly appreciated.

Update: The new project name for this fork have been given the name Plex Media Center for OS X.

References:
Elan’s post on his own blog for Plex
XBMC forum thread for discussion