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."

Remote removing

[mwvdlee]

Is the sourcecode sufficient to disable Amazon's ability to remotely remove ebooks?

Re:Remote removing

[Lumpy]

Yes if someone compiles a new OS and software package and delivers a "hack" that eliminates their control.

I'm just betting the "ad supported" version will become the first target as someone compiles and makes a file that turns it into a normal kindle.
Then we will hear of a federal bailout of the Executives as they will barely afford new Mercedes once a month anymore....

Re:All of 'em

[somersault]

I take it you missed the part of the comment you replied to that said they released the source for all of the Kindles? I can't think of anything I'd like to do with mine right now, but it is cool that I can mess about with it if I want. Porting nethack or something might be cool, since that's pretty well suited to an e-ink display.

Re:All of 'em

[tlhIngan]

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.

It's apparently a requirement for Netflix.

Sure every Android device can get Netflix, but what they stream is the SD version of the video. If you want the HD version, your device needs to be locked down.

Compare Netflix on the old Color and the new Tablet and you'll see a difference in video quality. It's another reason why I wrote off the "Netflix on Fire is blurrier on Fire" comparison reviews - of course it is if Amazon didn't qualify for Netflix HD. (And yes, the Amazon version was noticiably blurrier as it was scaled up to the screen, whilst the Tablet was scaling down a higher-quality stream).

And the Nook tablet having 1GB of user content - big whoop. Do what you do with every other Android device and stick an SD card in it.

B&N feels more people would want higher-quality Netflix than the small crowd who wants to hack the device (they're a nice bunch, but not as big a group as those who just want to consume stuff).