Amazon Releases Kindle Source Code

MackieChan writes with a piece of news that slipped past earlier this month: "Barnes & Noble receives a lot of credit from the Slashdot community for standing up to Microsoft and for allowing the Nook to be so easy to root, but perhaps Amazon releasing the source code to the Kindle will help it gain back supporters it lost after remotely removing ebooks."

Re:All of 'em

[Hardhead_7]

Considering that the Kindle Fire runs Android, are we supposed to forgive them for intrusive DRM because they abided by their legal requirements to us? Maybe we should also be happy that McDonald's food isn't full of arsenic or Mattel toys don't have lead paint. I mean, that's great and all, but they had to do it. It doesn't make up for the sorry state of the locked down Kindle.

Incidentally, this is coming from an Amazon Prime customer. I buy almost everything off of Amazon these days, with one exception: books. For that I have my Nook, which I use mainly because it reads PDFs too.

Gain back supporters?

[Kamiza Ikioi]

The remote book removal was 2 years ago, and helped shape Amazon (and much of the mobile tech industry) to be extremely weary of using kill switches. Frankly, I'm glad it happened. It immediately stopped the usual slow creep of increased user control.

I don't think this helps "gain back supporters", but I do think it reinforces Amazon as a company moving in their new direction since then. I like the Amazon model which tries to take the best of Google and the best of Apple, and throw out the worst parts. Tight product integration, but if you want to hack it, why bother stopping you.

Re:All of 'em

[JoeMerchant]

Considering that the Kindle Fire runs Android, are we supposed to forgive them for intrusive DRM because they abided by their legal requirements to us

Celebrate your easy victories... just because it's "legally required" doesn't mean that anyone will do it, especially major corporations.

Re:All of 'em

[Andy Dodd]

Intrusive DRM?

B&N is the one who locked the Nook Tablet's bootloader, tivoizing it. Not Amazon.

I love how the article points out how easily hackable the Nook Touch was while ignoring the fact that B&N has made a major move towards lockdown with the Tablet - locked bootloader, plus it is partitioned so you can only use 1GB of the storage for sideloaded content. The rest is "B&N Content" only.

Little frog, Big pond.

[westlake]

but perhaps Amazon releasing the source code to the Kindle will help it gain back supporters it lost after remotely removing ebooks.

You are talking about one of the hottest products on the market.

"Winning back" the geek is not all that important.