Boxee Beta is now open to all. Even its alpha release was rock solid, so one could think of the kind of expectation everyone has for Boxee Beta. From the first look, I have to say, Boxee beta has pretty much lived up to the hype.

D-Link unveiled its soon-to-be-released “Boxee Box” at Boxee’s preview of Boxee Beta in New York last night. Few details have been disclosed other than that it runs Boxee on Linux, provides HDMI and both analog and digital audio outputs, and hooks up to the Internet via either WiFi or Ethernet.

Boxee has just opened up its free A/V media center platform to all Ubuntu, Mac, and AppleTV users. Additionally, Boxee for Windows has entered “private-alpha” phase, during which prospective users apply for the software online and wait for a download link.

The buzz has been building for Boxee lately. Mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, BusinessWeek and NPR are getting hip to the little open-source media center that could quite possibly change the way you experience TV.

Boxee is an Open Source cross platform media center application which is again based on another Open Source media center application called XBMC. The latest boxee comes with live news support via Livestation.

The new frontiers for open source companies are social networking-related applications and Software as a Service, said Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange. "The appetite now in the venture community is to identify companies, like ours, that sell open source products into the Software as a Service environment," he said.

"...The definition of the term "Web service" is confused by popular marketing literature. Is the main Google Maps interface a Web service? Technically, it is not. Does the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) standard describe a Web service? Absolutely..."

I am often dismayed by the misappropriation of the term open source. Companies apply the term to products that are free though not open source. It’s a classic marketing maneuver to leverage a brand that already has broad recognition.

If you've been using the recently released Boxee Beta media center but found it to be a bit on unusable side of buggy (at least one Lifehacker writer felt that way), good news: Boxee just released an update to Boxee Beta, and while the update doesn't have any new features, it's overflowing with bug fixes (over 500 resolved issues in total).