Amazon's "Director of Kindle" has no problems with Kindle hacking, may allow Kindle to be used as a platform for third party apps in the future

I came across an interesting tidbit at SeattleTimes: Briar Dudley talked to Charlie Tritschler who apparently heads the Kindle program at Amazon. Getting right to the meat of it:

Is Kindle hackable? "It's not something we're opening up, but all devices can be hacked. That's something people can do."

Will there be APIs for software developers to write Kindle applications? "That's an important future direction for us."

Now contrast the "that's something people can do" to Apple's early reaction to iPhone apps where Jobs decried the idea in the name of 'security'. Pragmatically, there is definitely a conflict between any company's goal of making the most money they can out of a product and opening it up to be hacked though I wouldn't say the two are orthogonal. Hence, even this non-negative reaction that Amazon has to the Kindle being hacked is a refreshing change from the norm. As Tritschler says, I doubt that Amazon will be giving out the keys to the castle, so to speak. But I don't expect them to "brick" hacked Kindles like Apple did with iphones. And if (when) they release the APIs, I am sure there will be some sort of filtering process but I think it will still make the Kindle a better product ultimately benefiting Amazon. Time will tell!