Quote:
Originally Posted by ShellShock
Are they really open devices? To be truly open surely Kobo would have to provide full system documentation, souce code and tools, rather than the community having to laboriously reverse engineer the devices to provide some limited support for bulding our own add ons etc. I am not arguing for the devices to be more open, as I would prefer to get my support direct from Kobo. This is not to denigrate what members of the community have done with the limited information available.
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Open by modern standards, definitely. Open by the standards that you laid out, no. The thing that you have to keep in mind is that Kobo devices lack documentation from Kobo, yet very few of their other practices can be considered as restrictive. Even that documentation claim is a bit misleading, since much of the system is documented by third parties. This is particularly true when it comes to the open source software. If you're interested in the hardware, it turns out that the kernel reveals an awful lot. Should you need more information, there are kernel sources and (frequently) documentation for the components from their developers.
Is it work? Sure. Calling it laborious reverse engineering is a bit of an overstatement though. I don't mean to denigrate what they're doing, but I've seen the results of reverse engineering projects on closed systems (such as games consoles) and it is absolutely astounding how little information there is to go on in those cases.