Comment by jrib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrib | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I contacted their support about the openness of their device. This is their response in case others are interested:

    Aug 28, 2020, 3:44 PM GMT+2
    Hello there.
    
    Users can gain root access to the device by using SSH, so the device is open for developing your own software.
    The GPL and LGPL version 3 requires us to give users access to their own devices. It's part of the anti-tivoization clauses in the licenses.
    
    A lot of our software is open-source. You'll find a lot of our open source code here: https://github.com/reMarkable/. If you're interested in developing for the reMarkable, a good place to start would be on here https://remarkable.engineering/deploy/.
    
    Note that we do not currently provide any support for SSH related issues. Accessing the device and making changes through SSH is at the customers own risk.

Thanks, this was the question I had before purchasing, if they might decide to pull a Tivo in a future software update and kill off everything on https://github.com/reHackable. I mean, with enough resources they could replace everything with non-GPL3 licenses then lock it down, but that doesn't look likely, so I think I will go ahead and buy this.

Some of the projects on https://github.com/reHackable talk about having to be re-installed after upgrades, and other unfriendly vendor behaviour (e.g. https://github.com/reHackable/scripts/wiki/webui_invincibili...), which is slightly worrying, it'd be more assuring if they had better support for 3rd party software, or at least just a webpage saying "yes you can install 3rd party software, but note that it's not preserved over upgrades". The company I work for also sells a linux box, allows 3PS, and does have such a web page. Such a webpage might also cater to all the other people here commenting that their marketing dept is ignoring us.

Yeah I'm still on the fence but decided i'd take them up on the 30 day free return and evaluate it directly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com