Quote:
Originally Posted by theonna
So, what you actually saying, forget about asking Kobo to improve anything, rely on volunteer miracle workers, that agree with you and think they can port a better reader from some place, but it can not be done fully legally, since Kindle stuff is copyrighted... and you'd risk bricking your device, but then it is even better, you'd stop complaining and go away.  |
I like half of your answer, and don't get the other half.
The part I like is about relying on volunteer miracle workers. The ability to do this is a great thing! We should all be able to contribute to software with whatever skills we have, and open source makes this possible. Kobo's heavy reliance on open source extends this to their products. (For what it's worth: those miracle workers can do what they do because they understand sqlite, and open source project.)
As for the copyrighted/patented bit: I seriously doubt that Kobo can do much outside of nickel, and a few other proprietary applications/libraries. Databases themselves are not copyrightable. Since Kobo uses sqlite, they can't even claim rights to the data structures and file format it those were copyrightable. It is possible for people to do stuff of questionable legal standing if they are reverse engineering Kobo software, but most of the stuff I've seen is working at the level of open source software -- thus not of questionable standing.