LibreELEC Takes Flight As OpenELEC Fork

There's been grumblings about a growing fork of OpenELEC the past few weeks while today two Phoronix readers wrote in with news of LibreELEC, the new fork of OpenELEC as a Kodi/XBMC appliance Linux distribution that has a number of the original OpenELEC developers involved.

While the post is dated from the end of March, you can see the LibreELEC announcement here. One of the Phoronix readers tipping us off who often points us out Kodi/ELEC news summarized the situation as "LibreELEC is a non-profit fork of OpenELEC as a new JeOS (Just enough OS) for Kodi/XBMC Linux appliance distro. This fork of OpenELEC is created by a bunch (maybe even most) of somewhat disgruntled developers from the OpenELEC team who split after disagreement over various development philosophies with the founders and current leaders of OpenELEC in regards to how to develop processes (such as example rolling releases) and teamwork should work in open source projects, including the handling of profits from advertising, sponsors, and partnerships. After OSMC this is the second large-scale fork of OpenELEC, but unlike OSMC the aim of this new LibreELEC fork is to become a registered non-profit organization."

The code to LibreELEC is hosted on GitHub. More details on the new project can be found via LibreELEC.tv.