For years haters have tried to claim that the unofficial Kodi community stood for nothing but piracy. All the while, we maintained our stance that our existence is about making Kodi more accessible to newbies, while maintaining a friendly, positive atmosphere where unofficial developers can share and discuss their code without being exposed to negativity.

Haters would often claim that if developers weren’t interested in piracy, they would be using the official Kodi forums and not TV ADDONS. They were wrong, anyone who has spent time on the official Kodi site knows that it’s definitely not geared for newbies, and that the atmosphere within their forums is extremely hostile and non-conducive to innovation.

This level of hostility can be demonstrated in the latest spat between jsergio123 and the official Kodi team. What happened was that jsergio123 had attempted to submit one of his legitimate Kodi addons (Adultswim) to the official repository, which prompted a question about why he used his own module, instead of metahandler.

At which point he replied that the version of metahandler in the official repository was broken…

Lunatixz (Team Kodi staff) then replied saying that TV ADDONS developer Eldorado should submit the latest updates to the official repository. It has been a while since anyone from TV ADDONS submitted code there for obvious reasons…

Martijn (Team Kodi leader) seemed to prefer that rather jsergio123 use his embedded modules rather than have a TV ADDONS developer submit code, even though a day before Lunatixz had said the exact opposite…

At which point jsergio123 agreed and said that perhaps he would ask Eldorado to submit his metahandler changes anyway…

This is where things started to get hostile. Apparently jsergio123 had asked Martijn permission to use a public API key for TMDB belonging to Team Kodi. Keep in mind that this key is totally public…

At this point Lunatixz seemed to have disagreed entirely with what Martijn had said…

And then jsergio123 replied explaining that he had already made changes to metahandler, and that he would be willing to submit the code to the official repository…

To which Lunatixz replied, saying he should definitely submit the metahandler changes so that other developers could benefit from them too…

And jsergio123 replied that he would submit the changes…

Evidently jsergio123 submitted the metahandler changes as requested, only to receive this reply from Lunatixz saying that his changes did not affect functionality and would therefore not be accepted…

At which point jsergio123 replied arguing that the metahandler version in the official repository is broken and that his code changes would fix much of it…

Lunatixz replied questioning the form of the code written by jsergio123, essentially saying that jsergio123 should use the broken metahandler available in the official repository instead…

It should be noted that it is important that the official repository contain the latest up-to-date versions of dependencies, especially for addons which are housed in the official repository. Otherwise, users would have to install an unofficial repository to get updated dependencies for official addons.

At this point jsergio123 demonstrated frustration with the fact that he had spent already several days going back and forth with Team Kodi, correcting code, meanwhile his submission was being denied…

At which point official Kodi repository administrator Razzeee explained that since jsergio123’s metahandler update only corrected what he considers to be a minor fix, it would not make sense to accept the updated code into the official Kodi repository…

Lunatixz then went ahead and closed jsergio123’s metahandler contribution, denying the update…

Which resulted in jsergio123 voicing his frustration over Twitter…

At which point Razzeee replied on Twitter saying that his changes would have been accepted had he not voiced his frustration over Twitter, when actually his code contribution had already been closed and denied…

And jsergio123 responded…

At which point Martijn posted on GitHub telling him to get lost…

The name calling obviously got to jsergio123, who then replied saying he would push his own metahandler update which would dynamically scrape Kodi’s API keys for TMDB, that way they couldn’t reset them to prevent it from happening…

Which resulted in this interaction with da-anda (another Team Kodi developer) stating that they would stop providing API keys to Kodi users entirely if jsergio123 began automatically scraping them. Martijn then replied with a less than welcoming response…

At which point jsergio123 obviously gave up arguing, stating that when it comes to open source he could push whatever he wanted through his own repository, even if Team Kodi was against it…

To which Martijn replied basically telling him to get lost, while saying that he hopes the MPA pays him a visit…

It wasn’t really cool for Martijn to say he hopes that jsergio123 gets visited by copyright bullies, something you shouldn’t even wish upon your worst enemy, especially since jsergio123 is only involved in legitimate development.

Kodi then tweeted this message from their official Twitter profile, mislabelling the entire “unofficial” Kodi community as bad actors in the process…

At which point another unofficial developer who goes by the name JAV Stream stepped in to voice his concern that Kodi using this opportunity to scapegoat the entire unofficial community, when their issue should have only been with a single developer…

And it continues…

And jsergio123 got in the last word before the thread was once again closed…

We are not saying that jsergio123 was entirely correct in this situation, however we are trying to shine light on how the official Kodi team interacts with outsiders. They could have certainly been more welcoming of jsergio123’s attempts to contribute code, and could also have accepted the code change even though it may have only have fixed a small percentage of issues. Big or small, a fix is a fix.