About Schedules Direct

Schedules Direct is a non-profit organization whose mission is to educate the public about the benefits of Open Source Software and other free software, provide support functions for such software, and provide funding for research that facilitates the improvement or creation of Open Source Software and other free software for the benefit of the public at large.

Though we are incorporated as a non-profit and are in the process of applying for federal 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, no portion of our membership fee is likely to ever be tax deductible as a charitable contribution. However, if our 501(c)(3) application is accepted, we will start accepting donations separate from membership fees.

History

When Tribune Media Services announced that they were pulling the plug on their Zap2it Labs program in 2007, members of the affected Open Source and free software communities banded together to find a way for their users to continue accessing Tribune's great guide data.

Rather than forming a company to resell this data for a profit, the founders decided to stick with their free software roots and took the opportunity to build a non-profit corporation that could be used to sponsor Open Source development and help the community grow through education as well as more traditional means that are normally inaccessible to the kinds of unfunded projects that make up our list of supported applications.

What We Do

Your membership fees enable Schedules Direct to sponsor programs designed to help Open Source projects like MythTV and XMLTV to continue providing innovative community-driven applications as well as to grow their user bases and developer communities. These programs will include help with marketing at conferences and trade shows, as well as a grant system designed to provide funding for new projects or features, especially those that would generate new interest in Open Source Software or benefit the Open Source Software community as a whole.

Since one of our goals is to increase awareness and popular of Open Source alternatives to commercial media applications, we provide members with access to a data feed of TV Listings which we hope will make these applications easier to use as well as encourage participation in their user and developer communities. You can find out more about this on our Membership page.

We also offer a free program for schools that are interested in using MythTV as part of the Cable in the Classroom project. If you are interested, please don't hesitate to contact us for more information.

Because we are still in the process of applying for tax exempt status, we've been hesitant to move forward with many other programs. However, expect to see more from us in the near future, including a grant program to provide funding for Open Source projects.

If you'd like to support what we do, please sign up for a membership.

For applications: the data is provided in XML via a SOAP remote procedure call or through JSON. If you wish to avoid SOAP calls, XMLTV provides a client that can output the raw XML or a file in the standard XMLTV format. For documentation on the JSON service, please see JSON API

Who We Are

The people who run Schedules Direct are almost all either users or developers of the Open Source and free software applications that we help support. We try our best to have representatives from all supported applications on our Advisory Council, if not the Board itself.