The Boxee Box: too free to live?

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It may still be difficult to wander into a local electronics retailer and come away with a desktop system running Linux. But there is likely no shortage of Linux-based devices on sale in that store; one needs only wander past the Linux-based phones and cameras to the shelf where the networked video players live. Linux dominates on such devices, but, as the recent history of the Boxee Box shows, "Linux inside" does not necessarily mean "free" or that the device has a future.

The Boxee Box is based on the Boxee software which, in turn, is based on the XBMC media player. It gained an enthusiastic early following as the result of its open-source roots and the device's plugin infrastructure. The Boxee Box handled a wide variety of media types from the outset; in places where it fell short, others could easily provide plugins to fill in the gaps. So the Boxee Box became known as a device that could play almost anything.

Boxee Box users lost some of their enthusiasm over time. Early versions could be "unboxed" and made to run arbitrary software, but the company closed that hole in 2010 and it does not appear that anybody has figured out how to break newer versions. Bug fixes and improvements from Boxee slowed down over time, leading to user frustration. And now those users, the people who have supported Boxee to this point, have been informed that Boxee is abandoning the device in favor of its upcoming, USA-only "Boxee TV" product.

One can maybe understand a company that feels the need to declare end-of-life for a two-year-old consumer electronics product; such offerings often don't last anywhere near that long. But Boxee has not just left a product behind; it also left the entire community that had embraced that product. The new "Boxee TV" is a clear step backward in a number of regards: no plugin support, no support for arbitrary file formats, and a highly proprietary architecture throughout. It now features a new deal with US cable provider Comcast (ensuring that Boxee will not be blocked by the just-allowed encryption of basic cable content in the US) and features designed to warm the entertainment industry's heart. This article in The Verge describes the situation clearly:

Boxee’s gone from hated pirate outsider to shaper of telecom policy, and it’s done it by extending an olive branch to the largest and most entrenched interests in the business. XBMC and open source are gone now, replaced by a proprietary OS that’s built to support end-to-end content encryption and a policy compromise [Boxee CEO Avner Ronen] describes as “very reasonable.” And Boxee’s deemphasized its famously comprehensive support for weird video files as well — weird video files that generally come from torrent sites.

What has happened here is clear: Boxee has gone from trying to make its customers happy to making the entertainment industry happy instead. If that meant dumping its old customers and the development community that had built itself around the older product, then so be it. As XBMC developer Nathan Betzen put it, Boxee has moved from trying to expand its users' rights under copyright law to actively restricting those rights. In a sense, Boxee is telling us that we cannot have a box with plugin support and the ability to play "weird video files" — much less a truly open system — under the current copyright regime.

Boxee has also driven home a lesson we've heard many times before: just putting free software onto a device does not make the device free. Most of what is in the Boxee Box is freely licensed, but, without the ability to replace the software, the Boxee Box itself is not under its owner's control. It can have features taken away, contain evil software, or be turned into an obsolete, unsupported paperweight at a corporation's whim. Purchasing such a device may or may not be a rational decision, depending on what the purchaser's goals are. Developing for this kind of device seems like a mistake; one is working to improve an edifice whose foundation can be yanked out at any time.

Suitably skilled users who are aware of these issues will, of course, have avoided a device like the Boxee Box from the outset. It is certainly possible to put XBMC onto a properly equipped computer and have a truly free device to feed one's video consumption habits. That option has not gone away, but the world has still gotten a little worse; from Nathan's post again:

Most frustrating of all is the fact that, as an XBMC team member facing yet another rush of ex-Boxee users, I should be very pleased with this decision, but honestly, I’m not. Boxee, Plex, and XBMC have all been pushing each other to advance over the past four years. The competition for eyeballs has led to some incredible software (and a few stinging words). With Boxee’s decision to go down the Boxee TV road, I’m afraid the world will be left with one less competitor dedicated to true innovation for the sake of the media consumer.

Without an off-the-shelf open system, most viewers are going to be stuck with whatever the entertainment industry is willing to let them to have. Those who want something more flexible will need to build their own systems, run into all kinds of issues trying to access content that is rightfully available to them, and live under the assumption that their primary motivation is piracy.

Version 3 of the GPL will not save us here; manufacturers have shown every sign of being willing to dump software when its licensing gets in the way of their business objectives. Boxee went from being "passionate about open source software" to embracing a fully proprietary solution even without the extra requirements found in GPLv3 to worry about. Solutions to this problem, if they exist, will have to come from elsewhere.

What is needed is a combination of truly free alternatives, a willingness among buyers to insist on free devices, and copyright reform. In the handset market, buyers have begun to understand how nice it is to have alternatives like CyanogenMod — and to not have to go through a scary "jailbreaking" process to install it. As the content industry tries to tighten its grip on what our systems can do, awareness of the value of freedom may grow in this market as well. But it will be too late for Boxee Box owners who are now discovering that they lack the freedom to improve a device after its manufacturer has lost interest.

