Well, the free ride has ended: as of the start of this month, Zap2It no longer provides free TV listings data for programs like MythTV. It’s disappointing, but it’s also hard to complain about something that you didn’t have to pay for in the first place.
Zap2It doesn’t seem to want to have to deal with individuals, so Schedules Direct has been set up as an alternative provider to resell the data instead. There’s a recurring fee now, but I’ve found it too useful to go without, and it’s been set up as a non-profit company so they can try to bring the cost down as much as possible. Switching over wasn’t too painful; I just had to get a newer version of MythTV from the ‘proposed’ repository, add a new listings source, and rerun ‘mythfilldatabase’ to get the new listings.
And, now that I’m paying for it, I can now legitimately complain about all the minor little annoyances! ;)