1) As others have pointed out, this isn’t all of the Kindle source code. It’s a selection released in order to comply with the license requirements of the code written by other people which they modified for their own purposes. It’s good that they are not behaving illegally, but this is hardly something to praise them for. They benefited from using this code, and that benefit comes with an obligation to share their improvements. Quid pro quo, share alike.

2) Because the Kindle is a DRMed platform, the source code release does not actually give the user freedoms the user is intended to have by the free software licenses involved. Yes, you can look at Amazon’s changes and in theory you can make further improvements to code that *could* run on the Kindle. That would be awesome — except for Amazon has blocked your ability to put modified code back on your own device. Doing so requires circumventing part of their DRM system, which could earn you criminal prosecution under the DMCA. If Amazon were actually being a good free software community citizen, it would not block you loading modified software on to your own device. Look but don’t touch is the message here.

3) What’s not released is significant — the code, for example, that allows Amazon to arbitrarily disable the Text to Speech feature whenever they want, remotely.
Code that gives them significant power over users and how we can access books (in ways that have nothing to do with actual copyright law) remains secret.

So, the Kindle is still defective by design (http://defectivebydesign.org)
.

… in other news, techrunch resigns to its irrelevance and has given in to twitter. from this day forth all techcrunch stories will be determined by the most popular hashtags on twitter.

(i would have posted this to twitter first, but it’s over the 140 character limit)

It looks to me like they put all of the open source code they’re using up there.

Problem: I have diverse and unique interests largely unshared by my immediate social circle. Specifically, I like to contemplate and discuss God, reality, existence, etc. and pretty much only that (I’d put all other topics a distant second). The majority of my peer group enjoys other topics (and may indeed have the same problem; perhaps the content of our conversations is merely the lowest common denominator? Gossip, politics, weather, relationships, career?). I view books as a conversation between the author, previous authors/influences, the current reader, other authors, future authors, etc. I, like other readers and authors like to check sources/footnotes, do my own research (usually a quick wikipedia search) on unfamiliar terms and people. I also like to make notes, but they currently sit in the books themselves.

The potential: Turning books into a conversation – allowing commenting, sharing, aggregation of intellectual capital of the readership and authorship, research, local options, etc. I would pay for this, but would prefer to have all of this feed into the Amazon rec engine so my next book is spot on.

With this backstory, here are all things I want to do.

1. Import my FB and LI networks.
2. Have them tagged by their interests and be able to sort so I can share book recs, segments of text, comments, analysis, relevant links.
3. Have every action within this ecosystem count. Points for reading, commenting, sharing, points for having comments/analysis rated highly, etc. These points are associated with my tags, the tags of the book, tags of the author, etc. so the a true SME metric can be calculated.
4. Add comments/links inline as a read.
5. Choose whether I want the activity public or private or to share with a group of SME’s, friends, etc.
6. Be able to say agree/disagree in line.
7. Have summary reports available of my own activity.
8. Be able to find SME’s and their books, comments, influences, activity, etc.
9. Own this activity and be able to publish to my FB profile, blog, etc.
10. Have a searchable taxonomy ala the Britannica Great Books Synopticon and be able to find all the major advances in the exploration/development of a particular theme/idea, e.g. search “Love” and find all importance references from Dante to Toni Morrison.
11. Be able to just read these advances without buying a full book, e.g. iTunes of Netflix. I’m interested in an all-you can eat model.
12. Full profile of interests, SME’s, education, bio, etc. of readers and authors.
13. Enable the 2 most advance levels of reading – analytical and synoptical.

Amazon – please let me know when the above is ready. Phase two: Please read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. Please read the “Great Conversation” by Adler as well. Ruminate on them and how these ideas can be turned into better products and more enjoyable conversation.

i keep thinking of how some “caugh” VCs.. think being on TC is great.. but my god, you guys, i’m not impressed by your tech chops!!

the comments i see are seriously lacking in any understanding of tech issues, policies, strategies, or anything, other than basic comments…

i’m assuming VCs don’t really follow most of the threads here!!

the code Amazon has released has to do with the low level drivers for the device.. the higher level code that actually does the interesting stuff is a function of (i think) e technologies, and amazon… (my memory is fuzzy on this..)

http://javaswam...le-has-jvm.html

There’s a business model in that.

There’s nothing in the tarball that relates to reading books.

I would love to get that