Amazon Kindle Software Available as Open Source? Not Really. No eBook Bits

I got pretty excited when I read this title on TechCrunch…

Want The Kindle Source Code? You Can Have It.

So, I headed over to…

Amazon.com Source Code Notice

…which has source code for the original Kindle, Kindle 2 and Kindle DX. I downloaded the compressed tarball for the Kindle DX, unpacked it and started taking a look at the code. You can see the unpacked files in the screenshot above. As may be able to tell, the Kindle DX tarball contains other tarballs. If you look at the tarball names and have a working knowledge of Linux (and specifically the Debian Linux distro), you might be able to tell that there doesn’t seem to be any ebook related bits in the tarballs. You’ll see a lot of standard Linux components like alsa (sound drive), binutils (binary utilities), fuse (file system), glib (libraries), iptables (firewall) and linux (the Linux kernel). In fact, all the tarball names look pretty familiar to me. I don’t see anything off-hand that are ebook related.

I may have missed something, but this looks like just the Linux parts and associated utilities to me.

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