We’re passionate about open source software – it forms the basis of the software we’ve spent the last 4 years building and we love the spirit of the community around it. Without it, we would not have been inspired to build Boxee in the first place.

Boxee’s software is mostly licensed under GPLv2 and we make all open source code for Boxee’s PC software and embedded devices available for download on our website.  Boxee is originally forked from the XBMC’s open source code, and we continue to contribute to this great project.

Yesterday there was some noise in the open source community that a utility included with a pre-release version of the Boxee Box software is licensed under the GPLv3.    The utility, gpgv2, came in a pack of gpg utilities, including libgcrypt, which we use, and was erroneously included – but never used, and we subsequently removed it from the Boxee Box software. We have already put a new internal process in place for adding new F/OSS to Boxee and we are also doing a complete audit of our software to better document the licensing of the open source code we use.

In the end, the spirit of the initial argument was born more out of frustration with the inability to hack the Boxee Box. We had always hoped that the Boxee Box would be able to run XBMC, enable old-school emulators, and make breakfast in the morning.  But it quickly became clear  that to release a device with premium content, we’d need to put strict security measures in place. Lose the security requirements and lose access to some of the Boxee Box’s most popular content.

We started Boxee to see if we could take XBMC’s open source project and turn it into our day job.  4 years later, I’m pretty sure it’s turned into our day, evening, and night job.

The open source community continues to deliver some of the most innovative projects around and we’re happy to be a part of that, especially as a company that’s shown open source people out there that you can turn your passion in your profession.

– Tom

Boxee Co-Founder