Hi,
Sorry for not responding. I have been working on this day and night, and it takes soooo much time to respond to the forums that I wouldn't get any work done. The 1.1 release is done. As far as why I haven't been around to build a community... I started with the intention of building a FOSS community around this. However, after the 1.0 release I was inundated with problems and issues; literally hundreds of emails every day. I tried to work with some volunteers from the community, but there was so much time spent coordinating with them that I had no time to code, and it didn't prove too fruitful, and with the volume of emails I was getting, it was hard to even pick out who was serious, and I got frustrated by some flakes who were just looking for direct tech support more than to contribute. So, given the number of hours in the day and the amount of effort I realized it will take to build a FOSS community, my choices were to spend time working on building a community, which I figured would be hard to do since there were so many problems reported, or just bury my head in the code and try to fix everything. It was a no-win situation, but I chose to pass on the forums/emails/etc. and just code every moment I could. Once this next release is out and I see that LinuxMCE is stable, I intend to shift focus back to the community.
As far as the lack of sources... I started with an svn in sourceforge and my own build server. But it takes around 8 hours to build, and it was a huge task just trying to merge back in Pluto's changes that I was losing a lot of time. So even before the 1.0 release I asked if I could use their svn and one of their build servers, since it would benefit them too to have my fixes in their code. They agreed. As soon as the release 1.1 is done and I can breath, I'll release a new set of sources. There's no conspiracy and no attempt to be secretive, I just haven't had the time. I'm still up in the air about whether it's best to completely fork the code from Pluto. For FOSS/community reasons I want to, particularly because of their license, but until there's much of a community it's a lot of extra effort and it's easier to use theirs.
The Pluto license is an obstacle. It hasn't been my immediate concern because it doesn't really effect anything I'm doing or prevent me from releasing LinuxMCE. But it will need to be addressed eventually to get support from the community. Everything I've been doing is intended to be GPL, although 90% of my work is in scripts and other stuff to get it integrated, and I haven't taken the time to put copyrights or licenses on any of them, so I guess one could argue they're complete free and public domain with no license at all.
As far as Fiire goes, there are many companies that contacted me around the 1.0 release and said they're going to start shipping LinuxMCE products. Fiire did seem the most serious. They sent me a lot of equipment (pre-production prototypes of everything on their site) to be sure whatever fixes I made worked on their stuff. They also donated an HD camcorder so I could shoot a new demo video, and hired a few people to work on getting the 1.1 (now dubbed 0704) release out. AMD also provided some generous support, including helping get a new demo video done that is light years better than the original one I'm kind of embarrassed about. I think Fiire's got all the equipment in stock and ready to ship, but they're waiting for this next release to start shipping. I'm not sure why the site is live now, because I know they're not going to ship anything before this next release. I think they just figured nobody knew about it. There are other companies out there that said they'll also sell LMCE boxes once this release is out, although Fiire had that gyro remote custom made for LinuxMCE. Next week I promised to have this release out, and I assume then they'll officially announce it and go live, though I've just been focused on coding and haven't been following closely. I know they intend to get DVD's of LinuxMCE mastered and hand them out at Linux World (I won't be there).
Ok. Back to coding...
