Roku Developer Program

[RokuKevin]

There has been much interest in using the open source development
model to create useful channels for the Roku Digital player. Roku is
also interested in supporting channels developed in this way, but the
license chosen must comply with the Roku Developer Agreement.

The Roku Developer Agreement restricts developers using the Roku APIs
from incorporating open source code into applications that are subject
to licenses such as GPL and LPGL. The reason for this restriction is to
insure that Roku is not committed, without its knowledge or consent, to
post information in the Channel Store, the Roku user interface or in any
Roku documentation, such as a requirement to provide open source
licensing terms or notice of source code modifications to open source
code. A channel developer may not create or use source code that
imposes third party obligations on Roku.

There are various open source licenses that do not carry the same
obligations as the GPL and the LGPL and these would not violate the Roku
Developer Agreement. The MIT license and the Berkeley license, for
example, do not carry these obligations.

--Kevin

[zimbra]

Kevin, I know that some places I've worked in the past have hosted a "marketplace" for the swapping of extensions and plugins - I think that something similar for private channels might be a way to encourage the growth of the dev community. I can see a repository of freely shared code that would jump-start projects that could grow into channel-store entries, in the future.

(Looking at the previous paragraph, did I just describe sourceforge, with a roku banner at the top? Maybe I did.)

[RokuKevin]

Zimbra,

As you point out, there our sites out there that will help open source developers collaborate on projects. We are looking forward to seeing what channels the community will develop.

--Kevin