Hi!
Thank you for your thoughtful and considerate response
There are a few concerns expressed that I would like to address because your response is very different from my reality, and why I had hoped to have an open dialogue in the form of chat (and preferably with developers and not so public but it is what it is)
I do ultimately accept your decision and will not respond again unless requested, but please consider the following.
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I am a professional developer and systems administrator with over 20 years experience in the enterprise (primarily *nix servers and appliances) engineering field. This is not relevant, but maybe you will have a different opinion about how valid my suggestions could possibly be knowing I am not just a random child shouting from the internet.
I recently bought cheap Chinese handheld gaming devices for my 4 children, and to get them all to have the same GUI experience, I needed to find the source code of several different firmwares and patch them together. No big deal, I got them all running, it’s within the wheelhouse of my expertise anyways, and everything is fine. But in the process of going through the source, I learned a lot and noticed many things, and I started a dialog with the creator of the firmware.
To address your concerns. The only practical changes I expect were one more package.mk and some files would migrate to sources/BootELEC, and changes to code in that subdirectory would need to be pushed from that subdirectory, but everything else, the actual working environment and process of working on it / with it would not change much. The needed modifications to get from LibreELEC today and the BootELEC I envision is not a lot of code and more just setting up the repositories and moving files.
I did not expect LibreELEC (nor any fork) to be forced to contribute to, release, nor support any devices you were not already planning to, BSP or otherwise. You would work only on devices you plan to support, and you would only build images you plan to release
I envisioned BootELEC would consist of branches, and any devices without mainline support or any build issues would be locked to an unstable branch—unable to be merged to stable. In order to build a device with BSP, you’d need to intentionally checkout an unstable branch.
Just like Ubuntu does with Debian, forks could build an unstable branch to support early adopters, but I assumed LibreELEC wouldn’t release LibreELEC images built with an unstable BootELEC branch nor flag off every missing kernel feature. Whatever devices are being added are not supported by LibreELEC until or unless they reach mainline stability and LibreELEC bumps the package version.
I did, however, expect devices to potentially get mainline support faster, if developers (not necessarily your developers, just developers in general, like me) could use BootELEC unstable to quickly bootstrap a terminal and dogfood a new device to speed up HWE efforts by being able to run commands on-device and do some config updates in-place with something like VI or NeoVim. We have also seen when popular-enough projects are faster/easier to contribute than torvalds/linux, they can become a very successful and useful path for mainline contributions.
This idea was never about LibreELEC ceding control at all, it was only about establishing a consortium of similar communities whose only goal would have been to consolidate redundant coding efforts to a centralized repository. Not to create work, but reduce it for everyone.
As a staple of the FOSS community, I must admit I felt like I got punched in the stomach when your very first argument was that protecting your “apex position, dominance, and control” over the market is more important than supporting open source projects. Welcome to 2025, I guess.
Thank you for your time and response.