5 ms·

Amazon kindle source code

324 points by sundar22in 15y ago

markbao 15y ago
Like Palm's WebOS open source releases [0], this is the code of the modifications they made to open-source projects, some of which they are supposed to release under GPL. The title should be updated to reflect this. [0]: http://opensource.palm.com/packages.html http://opensource.palm.com/packages.html
- Xuzz 15y ago
  Apple has an equivalent page for iOS, but they've done a very good job phasing out anything GPL or LGPL licensed, and are now down to a very small set of tools with any code released: http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
  - mp3geek 15y ago
    The very reason why I prefer the GPL/LGPL over the BSD license, no obligation to give back/share with the community.
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      I don't get it. What purpose do the licenses serve if the software goes unused?
      - nknight 15y ago
        You could basically say the same thing about any proprietary license. It won't go unused by anyone who needs it and is willing to abide by the provisions of the license, same as any other software license. And there are many millions of people happily using GPL'd software every day.
    - pallinder 15y ago
      And the very reason I dont, I have no intention of forcing my views of what should be done with the sc onto people that might benefit from using it.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        You mean distribute it, not use it.
  - tobylane 15y ago
    It seems that what is left of GPL software there is either things that they've changed beyond recognition since taking on (webkit) or absolutely basic parts like gcc. Bit of a shame the larger pieces, all the way up to Darwin have nearly died.
  - nknight 15y ago
    Not sure what you mean, exactly. GCC went away for 5.x, sure, but that's because they've switched over to clang, which may not be (L)GPL, but is open source, and I haven't heard any stories of secret modifications to it. Everything else seems to have remained from one iOS release to the next...?
- nikcub 15y ago
  This is why, in my opinion, having the GPL force code sharing may sound nice in theory, but in practice it isn't very interesting. Amazon are just providing the bare essentials, there is no development community here, no way for them to take back any changes, no user or developer feedback, no documentation, build instructions, etc. - just a site that reads and looks like a legal obligation (and it is in the legal section of the Kindle docs). Compare this to Webkit - where there is no requirement to share code, but you have a number of companies that have setup very successful developer communities around the code base and a lot of products taking advantage of the work with both the rendering engine and the Javascript interpreters. You can require somebody to release code, but you can't force them to actively support it.
  - diminish 15y ago
    Kindle source code against KHTML/Webkit? I would rather compare it to OS/X or iOS which utilized the BSD and other open source codes and.. where is the community around them? oh no, where is the source code for them? Or did they just suck the open source code like a black hole? Now why would I blame GPL, because it forced Kindle to release at least, so that someone can benefit.
    - anon1385 15y ago
      >where is the community around them? http://www.puredarwin.org/ http://www.puredarwin.org/ >where is the source code for them? http://opensource.apple.com/release/ios-50/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/ios-50/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1072/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1072/
  - wheels 15y ago
    > Compare this to Webkit - where there is no requirement to share code, but you have a number of companies that have setup very successful developer communities around the code base... Huh? Webkit was based on an open source project (KHTML under the LGPL) and there is a requirement that the code be shared. Also Apple basically did the same thing as Amazon did here at first: they just dropped huge tarballs on the developers with no comments. In fact, attempting to merge Apple's changes in without comments was so divisive that the forks split, and only years later did Apple open up to an extent with WebKit that it became a proper collaborative effort. As for whether or not it's useful in practice ... note that I am one of the authors of one of the things they released, and my first reaction was to run a diff against the original to see if they'd made any interesting changes (they haven't).
Achshar 15y ago
yup, they have to release the code due to the license..
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
skeletonjelly 15y ago
For some reason I thought it would be the source code for the reader component but it looks like it's just conforming to the GPL license requirements for things they've modified. Kindle_src_3.2.1_576290015.tar.gz contains: http://pastie.org/2699524 http://pastie.org/2699524
wheels 15y ago
I thought it was kind of neat to that a library I'd written was one of the 45 included. I was kind of curious to see what they'd changed, but it ended up being a little boring: https://gist.github.com/1289293 https://gist.github.com/1289293 It's a library for reading / writing audio meta data (tags) and they basically just removed support for several formats. What's perhaps more interesting is what they didn't remove: I don't have a Kindle, but from the code this would seem to imply that it supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in some capacity. Also noted that they're using a version from early 2008, even though there have been 5 more recent releases since. Edit: I also went back and grabbed the very first Kindle release, which contained only 22 packages (TagLib still being one of them), and there they used an even older version (meaning they do at least sometimes grab newer versions of the libs).
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  > I don't have a Kindle, but from the code this would seem to imply that it supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in some capacity. Haven't tried with .ogg and .flac, but new Kindles have capacity to play .mp3 files. It's more of an experiment from on their part, and the player supports only play and pause operations.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    I have the 1st gen Kindle and it always had the capability to play mp3s, as well as a removable memory card slot.
  - absentbird 15y ago
    alt + f will also skip the song you are on and play the next one.
- shrikant 15y ago
  Oh hello - and thank you for TagLib. It's crazy fast and made my life infinitely easier when I needed to roll my own quick-and-dirty ID3 cleaner-upper :)
ctz 15y ago
Unfortunately, still no SDK and no sign of movement. This is really sad, as I'd love access to the Kindle's market.
- sundar22in 15y ago
  I registered for an SDK and i hope i get it soon. It does not look like its coming.
  - alimoeeny 15y ago
    I registered ages ago and didn't even received an email back!
jasiek 15y ago
For a split second there I understood that as "Kindle SDK being released today".
smallegan 15y ago
Will the Fire be on here when it launches?
- Maakuth 15y ago
  Mostly no, I think, because most of Android source code is licensed under Apache license, so they don't need to publish their modifications.
mih 15y ago
Does this mean the community can finally add support to epub books?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  The community has had that option ever since the Kindle v1. Amazon has honored the license ever since they launched.
dfc 15y ago
Why did this get upvoted so many times? It has been available for years now. I'm afarid to say that I think people upvoted this without even reading the link. I'd bet that 200+ people who voted for this thought it was the source to amazon's proprietary components. Its not, its gpl'ed code that has been available for as long as amazon has sold the kindle.
- pbreit 15y ago
  I'm not aware of any rules or customs around voting submissions based on publish date. I suspect the current interest is driven by the recent release of the Kindle Fire as well as questions about Amazon's duty to publish changes of certain licensed code.
  - dfc 15y ago
    What questions are there related to changes to GPLd code? I don't think a 3 or 4 year old link is neccessarily newsworthy but you are right there is no rule against old content being relevant. That being said my real complaint is who cares? Linksys, Apple, Brother Printing; all these companies publish their mods to GPLd code. But people did not upvote this because they were interested in GPL mods they upvoted it because they assumed it was something else entirely and never read the link...
jrmg 15y ago
I'm really surprised to see so much GPL and LGPLed code in here. Doesn't the license require that, in addition to having the source code, that it be possible for the user be able to re-compile and re-link the binaries? Isn't this impossible with the Kindle hardware?
- abrahamsen 15y ago
  The GPLv3 tries to enforce that, earlier versions failed to do so.

324 points by sundar22in 15y ago

Like Palm's WebOS open source releases [0], this is the code of the modifications they made to open-source projects, some of which they are supposed to release under GPL. The title should be updated to reflect this. [0]: http://opensource.palm.com/packages.html http://opensource.palm.com/packages.html

Xuzz 15y ago
Apple has an equivalent page for iOS, but they've done a very good job phasing out anything GPL or LGPL licensed, and are now down to a very small set of tools with any code released: http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
- mp3geek 15y ago
  The very reason why I prefer the GPL/LGPL over the BSD license, no obligation to give back/share with the community.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    I don't get it. What purpose do the licenses serve if the software goes unused?
    - nknight 15y ago
      You could basically say the same thing about any proprietary license. It won't go unused by anyone who needs it and is willing to abide by the provisions of the license, same as any other software license. And there are many millions of people happily using GPL'd software every day.
  - pallinder 15y ago
    And the very reason I dont, I have no intention of forcing my views of what should be done with the sc onto people that might benefit from using it.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      You mean distribute it, not use it.
- tobylane 15y ago
  It seems that what is left of GPL software there is either things that they've changed beyond recognition since taking on (webkit) or absolutely basic parts like gcc. Bit of a shame the larger pieces, all the way up to Darwin have nearly died.
- nknight 15y ago
  Not sure what you mean, exactly. GCC went away for 5.x, sure, but that's because they've switched over to clang, which may not be (L)GPL, but is open source, and I haven't heard any stories of secret modifications to it. Everything else seems to have remained from one iOS release to the next...?
nikcub 15y ago
This is why, in my opinion, having the GPL force code sharing may sound nice in theory, but in practice it isn't very interesting. Amazon are just providing the bare essentials, there is no development community here, no way for them to take back any changes, no user or developer feedback, no documentation, build instructions, etc. - just a site that reads and looks like a legal obligation (and it is in the legal section of the Kindle docs). Compare this to Webkit - where there is no requirement to share code, but you have a number of companies that have setup very successful developer communities around the code base and a lot of products taking advantage of the work with both the rendering engine and the Javascript interpreters. You can require somebody to release code, but you can't force them to actively support it.
- diminish 15y ago
  Kindle source code against KHTML/Webkit? I would rather compare it to OS/X or iOS which utilized the BSD and other open source codes and.. where is the community around them? oh no, where is the source code for them? Or did they just suck the open source code like a black hole? Now why would I blame GPL, because it forced Kindle to release at least, so that someone can benefit.
  - anon1385 15y ago
    >where is the community around them? http://www.puredarwin.org/ http://www.puredarwin.org/ >where is the source code for them? http://opensource.apple.com/release/ios-50/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/ios-50/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1072/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1072/
- wheels 15y ago
  > Compare this to Webkit - where there is no requirement to share code, but you have a number of companies that have setup very successful developer communities around the code base... Huh? Webkit was based on an open source project (KHTML under the LGPL) and there is a requirement that the code be shared. Also Apple basically did the same thing as Amazon did here at first: they just dropped huge tarballs on the developers with no comments. In fact, attempting to merge Apple's changes in without comments was so divisive that the forks split, and only years later did Apple open up to an extent with WebKit that it became a proper collaborative effort. As for whether or not it's useful in practice ... note that I am one of the authors of one of the things they released, and my first reaction was to run a diff against the original to see if they'd made any interesting changes (they haven't).

Achshar 15y ago

yup, they have to release the code due to the license..

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

skeletonjelly 15y ago

For some reason I thought it would be the source code for the reader component but it looks like it's just conforming to the GPL license requirements for things they've modified. Kindle_src_3.2.1_576290015.tar.gz contains: http://pastie.org/2699524 http://pastie.org/2699524

wheels 15y ago

I thought it was kind of neat to that a library I'd written was one of the 45 included. I was kind of curious to see what they'd changed, but it ended up being a little boring: https://gist.github.com/1289293 https://gist.github.com/1289293 It's a library for reading / writing audio meta data (tags) and they basically just removed support for several formats. What's perhaps more interesting is what they didn't remove: I don't have a Kindle, but from the code this would seem to imply that it supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in some capacity. Also noted that they're using a version from early 2008, even though there have been 5 more recent releases since. Edit: I also went back and grabbed the very first Kindle release, which contained only 22 packages (TagLib still being one of them), and there they used an even older version (meaning they do at least sometimes grab newer versions of the libs).

TeMPOraL 15y ago
> I don't have a Kindle, but from the code this would seem to imply that it supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in some capacity. Haven't tried with .ogg and .flac, but new Kindles have capacity to play .mp3 files. It's more of an experiment from on their part, and the player supports only play and pause operations.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  I have the 1st gen Kindle and it always had the capability to play mp3s, as well as a removable memory card slot.
- absentbird 15y ago
  alt + f will also skip the song you are on and play the next one.
shrikant 15y ago
Oh hello - and thank you for TagLib. It's crazy fast and made my life infinitely easier when I needed to roll my own quick-and-dirty ID3 cleaner-upper :)

ctz 15y ago

Unfortunately, still no SDK and no sign of movement. This is really sad, as I'd love access to the Kindle's market.

sundar22in 15y ago
I registered for an SDK and i hope i get it soon. It does not look like its coming.
- alimoeeny 15y ago
  I registered ages ago and didn't even received an email back!

jasiek 15y ago

For a split second there I understood that as "Kindle SDK being released today".

smallegan 15y ago

Will the Fire be on here when it launches?

Maakuth 15y ago
Mostly no, I think, because most of Android source code is licensed under Apache license, so they don't need to publish their modifications.

mih 15y ago

Does this mean the community can finally add support to epub books?

sliverstorm 15y ago
The community has had that option ever since the Kindle v1. Amazon has honored the license ever since they launched.

dfc 15y ago

Why did this get upvoted so many times? It has been available for years now. I'm afarid to say that I think people upvoted this without even reading the link. I'd bet that 200+ people who voted for this thought it was the source to amazon's proprietary components. Its not, its gpl'ed code that has been available for as long as amazon has sold the kindle.

pbreit 15y ago
I'm not aware of any rules or customs around voting submissions based on publish date. I suspect the current interest is driven by the recent release of the Kindle Fire as well as questions about Amazon's duty to publish changes of certain licensed code.
- dfc 15y ago
  What questions are there related to changes to GPLd code? I don't think a 3 or 4 year old link is neccessarily newsworthy but you are right there is no rule against old content being relevant. That being said my real complaint is who cares? Linksys, Apple, Brother Printing; all these companies publish their mods to GPLd code. But people did not upvote this because they were interested in GPL mods they upvoted it because they assumed it was something else entirely and never read the link...

jrmg 15y ago

I'm really surprised to see so much GPL and LGPLed code in here. Doesn't the license require that, in addition to having the source code, that it be possible for the user be able to re-compile and re-link the binaries? Isn't this impossible with the Kindle hardware?

abrahamsen 15y ago
The GPLv3 tries to enforce that, earlier versions failed to do so.