Free Software Foundation calls upon Amazon to free the ebook reader.

Stallman's Right to Read (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html) is slowly becoming more and more relevant.

Does anyone else think they would love to open source it, but the publishers won't let them? Surely Amazon would love to be able to put all their books on the kindle without DRM. But the publishers would be up in arms if this happened, as they want control. At least this way Amazon is slowly getting many more publishers into the digital age.

Without discussing whether the Kindle should be open source, it seems like there's something easier Amazon can do to prevent this from happening again.

If Amazon's ebooks were DRM-free, customers could back up their titles on hardware that does not occasionally receive orders from the mothership to delete their books.

I'm pretty annoyed at how badly the Richard Stallman cult members have flooded the Kindle DX Amazon reviews. It's very tedious now to wade through the spam to find reviews written by somebody who actually owns a Kindle.

Is this supposed to make me sympathetic to the Free Software movement? It's certainly not going to convince me not to buy a Kindle DX which is the first gadget that I've seen worth getting excited about in the last 10 years.

A while back there was a rumour that Amazon had open sourced the Kindle, which turned out to be false of course. The code was really GPL'd Linux libraries and drivers.

In an ideal world I think Amazon should open source the Kindle software, but I think because of pragmatic business repurcussions it won't happen anytime soon.