Summary: XBMC finally hangs up on Microsoft's Xbox, leaving the monopolistic company in more of an embarrassing state amid departure of chiefs

Not only Microsoft is abandoning Xbox, whose leadership is still leaving Microsoft in droves. XBMC too is dropping Xbox like a hot plate, whereas other platforms -- Free/libre ones included -- will still be supported.

The XBMC developers have announced that they are dropping support for XBOX consoles. Although the popular open source media centre started as a program for modified XBOX consoles, the developers say that the "XBOX has hard limits for what it can handle" and that "it is a popular misconception that official XBOX development is still taking place by the team".

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XBMC has been forked into a number of other programs, including, for example, Boxee and Plex. The latest release of XBMC is version 9.11 from the end of December, 2009. XBMC is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Here is the original message from XBMC:

XBMC (XBMP really) started as a program for modified XBOX consoles. In the following years, XBMC has grown into a multi-platform, multi-architecture media center that runs on most standard hardware. The hardware and legal limitations of the XBOX were always a concern and the Team has instead focused on running on the hardware that most people already have.

The last official release for the XBOX by the XBMC team was Atlantis, over 18 months ago. Since then, one brave soul (Arnova) has been merging code from the main codebase into the XBOX branch in our repository. Because there were many users out there that took advantage of these updates, we had no problem with this.

We might write some more about this at a later stage, after more investigation into the reasons and the consequences. What this basically shows is that at Microsoft, the hardware unit/products in general are dying. Here is some advice from IDG [via]. Quitting this entire hardware market is named as a possibility. Microsoft has been losing billions of dollars there. Apple and IBM are hardware companies; Microsoft -- just a wannabe. ⬆