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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
The point (of GPL) is not that new community has to form around this released source, nor that the consumers having bought devices using GPL software would be able to recreate them with their own software modifications. The point is that for example Linux developers get to utilize possibly useful modifications made by product vendors, say bug fixes.
> The point is […] utilize possibly useful modifications […]
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.
Code releases like this can still be very valuable to communities trying to open up the devices, often against the wishes of the device manufacturers. It's unfortunate if the OEMs only comply with the letter but not the spirit of the license, but it's still a lot better than completely proprietary code.
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.
If people really cared, they would figure it out. That's the point of making them release the source- it can be figured out.
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.
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.