LibreELEC is a lightweight ‘Just enough OS’ Linux distribution purpose-built for Kodi on current and popular mediacentre hardware. We forked from the OpenELEC project in March 2016 when it became clear the original project could no longer operate effectively with one person in charge, and with that one person refusing to communicate or listen to other team members (untested changes in public releases was a frequent source of friction). Since forking our team has grown, but retains a strong focus on stable development. We also believe passionately in the long-term value of collaboration and upstreaming code instead of hoarding patches, and we participate actively with other Open Source projects and the ecosystem of regular and drive-by contributors that surround us. LibreELEC remains Kodi oriented but we too have been forked to provide the stable JeOS base for Plex Embedded, Lakka, and a number of single-purpose IoT and maker projects.

FOUNDING PRINCIPLES

The software output of LibreELEC will look familiar to OpenELEC users; on the surface we both run Kodi with much common code, but the projects differ on their core values:

LibreELEC is governed by a project board elected from active team members to set project goals, priorities, and take executive decisions. The board ensures project tasks are distributed among volunteers; we operate on the principle of “many hands make light work” and no project task should ever depend on the skills or efforts of a single person. In the long-term we intend to preserve the collaborative nature of the project by registering LibreELEC as a non-profit charity or foundation.

LibreELEC talks openly about its release schedule (when asked, and in advance when possible). Our goal is to never leave you (or ourselves) guessing when the next maintenance or public beta release will arrive. Kodi sometimes proves to be a moving target, but when things change we communicate, not frustrate.

LibreELEC intends to be a stable and bleeding-edge distribution. Untested and experimental commits on the bleeding-edge of development will be restricted to our master branch. Our active release branches are effectively frozen at release so future maintenance updates contain only fixes for reported user and security issues plus minor hardware support changes.

LibreELEC intends to be non-profit in nature with published funding goals and public updates on our progress towards those goals. If you sponsor or donate to the project we guarantee 100% of your funds will be used for project goals.

LibreELEC intends to have minimal advertising on our website and forums. Your donations and a small number of discrete and tasteful spots for commercial sponsors will ensure there’s no need to overload your browser with AdSense.

LibreELEC sponsorships will be for an agreed fixed-term with the responsibilities and expectations of both project and sponsor documented in a Memorandum Of Understanding that is shared with the project team and summarised to our users to ensure broad support and cooperation.

LibreELEC welcomes community builds and encourages people to submit additional projects and device sub-projects to our central GitHub repo. We aren’t going to build or support everything that’s submitted as an official release, but providing a clear development target for emerging and niche hardware will de-fragment community efforts and create a stronger ecosystem around the project. LibreELEC can provide community builders and add-on creators with http://name.libreelec.tv hosting space to publish and a dedicated forum area to support their creations from on request.

CONTACT

For regular user and general development support please use our community forum. We have an active and vibrant community that will help you to solve issues and the forum is divided into several high-level topic areas to help you find answers and post questions. To contact the LibreELEC team for any other non-support reason please send email to [email protected]

LICENSE

LibreELEC is free and Open Source software. This means you are free to clone, use and adapt our software with no licensing fee — as long as you respect the terms of the GPLv2 license. In broad terms the GPLv2 obliges you to provide on request the full sources of what you distribute. This means the sources of all packages that are part of the LibreELEC image including original LibreELEC software, Kodi and all changes/adaptions made to create your own version. To aid compliance it is recommended that you use GitHub to clone LibreELEC sources to your own GitHub repository and then push all changes you make back to the same public repository. This ensures the chain of authorship on code is visible. It also makes upstreaming of fixes and improvements to our main repository easier. As LibreELEC contains original Kodi software you are also subject to terms and conditions of Kodi trademarked items (i.e. the Kodi name and visual marks) contained therein. The Kodi foundation has strict rules on modification — please understand them.

HELP HELP HELP!

To fulfil our long-term project vision the LibreELEC team needs your help. Please have a look at our Contribute and Sponsor pages to see how you can assist!