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.
The title should be updated to reflect this.
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.
>where is the source code for them?
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).
GPL becomes tremendously powerful once the licensed technology becomes significantly important enough that companies will accept the GPL in order to benefit from the technology.
Linux is testimony to this.
The ideology which spawned the GPL is that systems should be open. When a consumer buys something like the Kindle, he or she should be able to make changes to the system, i.e. rebuild a modified version of the OS and use that instead of Amazon’s original version.
The GPL is an ingenious way to transform the world of closed software to one where instead it is open, case in point being the Kindle, where Amazon decided to build on source already out there, and due to the license (GPL) in turn has to make their device more open than had they e.g. used BSD licensed software.
It is my opinion that nobody has screwed around much with the Kindle because it pretty much already does everything everybody wants it to do. Biggest want I've ever heard was that it doesn't support ePub, but you can convert to mobi so I don't think anyone has really been aching to patch it.
... I rest my case.
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.
Everything else seems to have remained from one iOS release to the next...?