I am the primary author of the current generation Pebble Appstore frontend, the one that maintained the database most of the time, the guy who ran the security, infrastructure, data privacy team, and quite a few things around the Pebble ecosystem over the years. I also was on the team that begrudgingly had to hand it all over to Fitbit in the acquisition.
I have a very strong opinion here.
Any development of Pebble as an ecosystem that is not 100% free open source software and available to the public, is a dick move at this point. It is a dick move if Eric does it in any way, and it is a dick move if the Rebble team does it in any way.
Let Eric or anyone else scrape what they want with the Appstore and wish them luck. Maybe even make a nice JSON export button for people, why not?
Meanwhile those in the community should keep doing what they have always done: Work towards fully open source community first solutions with the full blessing and support of said community.
Proprietary solutions are always a dead end so do not waste any energy fighting them or thinking about them. Just keep pushing to public repos.
FWIIW I have not yet talked to either side about this and we should wait to hear more from the other side before we raise our torches too high.
But regardless of whatever happens with Core Devices and Rebble: Personally, I just want choice and ownership. If Core Devices does not make it hard to compile and load my own firmware from FOSS sources, and so long as there is a short path to interface with new hardware over bluetooth/wifi/lora etc with a FOSS SDK or CLI tools, I am very likely to be a customer and ignore any drama.
The pursuit of more hackability and choice are why I backed Pebble in the first kickstarter, and the lack of total freedom and choice in daily-wear-ready devices in the current market are why I have exclusively used analog watches the past 5+ years.
Am I right in assuming that a large number of different people have contributed to this entire ecosystem throughout the years/decades?
I totally get why you wouldn't want your work to end up silo'd to a specific org if you had created it, intending it to be used by the general user, and not (via) a company.
A commitment to making things available to all, means making them available to those seeking to make profit from your work without giving you any influence.
Rebble was built on borrowed work of others combined with their own and should be willing to pay that forward for anyone else that wants to try out alternative visions for the Pebble ecosystem.
Open source solutions are unkillable so long as a community exists, unlike proprietary solutions. No proprietary solutions by Core Devices are a threat to Rebble.
They should negotiate a big donation for Rebble and shake hands.
Lance -- I really like this comment because it is a compelling argument for something other than the viewpoint I hold. Obviously I am not fully convinced by it (yet?). But this is the kind of discussion that we had hoped for in response to this post. Thanks for posting it.
> We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.
> We’d already agreed to give Core a license to our database to build a recommendation engine on. Then, Eric said that he instead demanded that we give them all of the data that we’ve curated, unrestricted, for him to do whatever he’d like with. We asked to have a conversation last week; he said that was busy and could meet the following week. Instead, the same day, our logs show that he went and scraped our servers.
Seriously uncool. I don't really consider myself a part of the Pebble community anymore (despite having two of the OG Pebble) but I'd def lean towards getting legal input on this...
Not cool. I can't help but think this must be pretty self-defeating. The market for the Pebble watches is not general consumers who will never see things like this going on in the background, it's relatively technical people who know a lot about the devices they are using, almost by definition. I can only assume that this will be widely known quickly in the customer base.
There may be another side to this story, but it's so far not a good look for Pebble/Core, and this post is well reasoned and written enough that I doubt there are many places for alternate explanations to hide.
I can't edit this comment anymore, but I think there is another side to this that is worth hearing. I stand by my point that openness is likely core to the Pebble customer base, but it's less clear to me now that Rebble are living up to that.
What a mess. Eric, I think you will have some explaining and negotiating to do. You might feel like you don't have the time, but this could soon turn existential for your project. For now I keep my order up, I'm sure there's a way for both of you to reach an agreement that doesn't devalue one or the other party.
For those immediately jumping ship: have some patience and observe. You heard one side of the story that yes, someone was frustrated enough to drag all of this public, but that cannot possibly tell the whole story. Please stop escalating the problem by throwing it all away and instead seek to reach out and steer this around instead.
I dunno how you can represent this any other way. The Rebble people more or less say they did nothing but give stuff away and want to talk. Eric/Core seem to be taking and taking, and giving nothing back.
For what it's worth he IS contributing to libpebble3 at least, but yes most of it is closed
I do get the idea, he wants to build hardware and thus needs to be able to do whatever he wants to the code and not wait for merges but it sucks he seems to probably take it too far, for example not using the Rebble mobile app and instead making his own around the library, that's also closed source
I mean, it’s not that I necessarily blame him for taking stuff that is open source, but giving the impression that you will not sideline the others entirely and then doing so anyway feels icky.
I wouldn’t want to deal with a random open source project while running a company either, but I wouldn’t try to pretend to either, I hope.
Assuming Eric / Core doesn't come out with some scathing "real story":
Well, it's better to figure this out today (that Eric / Core are not so great) rather than a year or two down the line when I'd have already bought a new Pebble. Still sucks, I was excited. Never had one but I want something in the same niche.
Does anyone have suggestions for other good low-capability, long battery, hackable eink watches?
Former Rebble dev here, I've been very happy with the BangleJS. It doesn't meet all of your criteria but the battery lasts me a week and it's more hackable than Pebble ever was.
What a bummer. It seems like what they're asking for here (a written agreement that users will be able to access 3rd party app stores) would be a win win win for Core Devices, Rebble, and users. Core Devices gets to look like a super good guy (ideally driving interest in the product), Rebble gets to look like a huge winner maintaining something for the community (as they are), and users get an open ecosystem.
There's still a chance for a win here, but looks like the door is closing.
I'm new to Pebble and have been excited about joining the community; I have a Pebble Time 2 on preorder. I will certainly cancel the pre-order unless Rebble affirmatively says they are satisfied with the arrangement.
I'm in the exact same position. It's beyond belief that the new (hardware) company wouldn't see itself in long-term collaboration with the community organization (providing services/platform).
Indeed, it bodes rather poorly for the sustainability of Core if they're already behaving like owning everything is critical to satisfying some hypergrowth checkbox. I kind of thought the whole point of the new organization was not to be another startup and to rather to be more like a scaled cottage industry player, making a niche product for nerds and selling it directly to them for a reasonable upfront profit margin rather than depending on collecting rent from a closed app ecosystem to pay the bills.
> We’ll compromise on almost everything else, but our one red line is this: Whatever we agree on, there has to be a future for Rebble in there.
I can see through to the good intentions, but this mindset has a very dangerous sandbagging risk to the other party.
Could you imagine a company forcing you to exclusively use them and only them as a vendor for the foreseeable future? Not just for a single contract, but for many contracts beyond it? Or one especially long contract?
That’s just not fair.
There are some other red flags here too. I am not convinced they have the ability to license a database they themselves scraped, nor if there’s any obligation to merge the particular code changes if any back upstream.
I agree, I think that’s the intended interpretation — but I’m disappointed that’s not their stated redline then, though.
The ask there is for a future in app stores beyond Core Devices, not just for Rebble specifically. That is a call for Core to open their platform; what they have now is a call for Core to open their platform to them.
I'm torn here. I love that Rebble folks have kept things alive. I also love that Eric underwent the effort to make new hardware.
I'm also a bit sad that this is the first we're hearing of this tension, because it likely would've changed my decision to purchase a new Core 2 Duo watch, and I would've preferred this sort of falling out happen before a lot of devices have been purchased.
Can you cancel the preorder? Or is the device you mentioned already out and too old to return? Some credit cards will refund you if terms changed after a purchase as well.
I used Rebble for many years and bought the new Core Devices watches. The truth is Rebble will die without new hardware. It was declining in usage and I myself stopped using it when my old Pebble hardware gave out, until the prospect of new hardware came around.
There needs to be a business making money to build the hardware to support this community. I appreciate that Rebble kept the flame alive, but I support Eric and Core Devices in building a business that makes enough money to fund new development of both hardware and software.
And the hardware is useless without the software... its a smartwatch ecosystem, they need each other, and Core screwing over Rebble is not OK (if it is true)
Only a small part of the software in use here was written by Rebble. They cloned the Pebble app store originally, but the store has no value by itself. What makes it valuable is the catalog of watchfaces and apps, approximately none of which were built by Rebble. They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic. The software on the watch itself is mostly Pebble software with mostly Core Devices modifications. The phone app was written mostly by Core Devices. By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.
It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit and Pebble engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
The android app had stopped working for me a couple of months before the new Pebble came out, so my Old Pebble Time was at EOL, and unusable.
The new Pebble app by Core devices made it work again.
Rebble didn't do that.
They were effective only keeping the old devices on life support.
Don't get me wrong, it's awesome that Rebble came along and extended the life of our Pebbles.
I'm siding slightly more with Eric and Co. than with Rebble.
> By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.
The "a month or two" was specifically about the mobile app, not the firmware, dev portal or store data.
To me it seems pretty obvious that Core Devices has benefited and enourmous amount from Rebble's work. The fact that Core Devices seems uninterested in contributing back tells me all I need to know about their ethics.
Rebble didn't write the firmware, just as they didn't write the apps and watchfaces that they scraped from Pebble for their store. Their main contributions were writing a web app to clone the Pebble store and maintaining it for many years, which we are all grateful for. But that doesn't give them ownership of the apps and watchfaces that give the store its value, nor the firmware that was open sourced by Google, which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
> nor the firmware that was open sourced by Google, which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
Yet Eric didn't fork Google's codebase, they forked Rebble's codebase.
> Rebble didn't write the firmware, just as they didn't write the apps and watchfaces
They did work on both. You seem pretty dismissive and one sided here.
> which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
Source?
The official google announcement claims that the code was open sourced "to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016"... which combined with an explicit callout to Rebble later, is a pretty darn clear statement that the code was released because of Rebble, not because of Eric.
Edit: So on one side we gave a community organization that us the only reason such a strong community still exists that has spent longer taking care of the Pebble community that Pebble the company existed. On the otherside we have an individual who has already sold out the community once, who is trying to start another company by extracting the sweat equity of the organization that rescued his community from his choices. While doing this, he can't even be bothered to give credit to that organization for the massive opensource headstart they gave his mobile app or other efforts. Instead HE tries to take full credit for opensourcing his derivative work.
Edit: So while I agree that the Pebble community needs a for profit hardware partner, I no longer believe that parter can be Core Devices or led by Eric due to a lack of trust and ethics.
Look, even Rebble's own blog post about the open sourcing says "a massive shout out to Eric Migicovsky for ensuring this happened". It is clear that he was the driving force that started the process inside Google that allowed it to suddenly happen after all these years.
Rebble did some work on the open source firmware in the four months between when Google opened it and Core Devices forked. It's a very small amount compared to the bulk of the whole firmware, which was originally developed by Eric's company, let's not forget. A few months of contributions don't give Rebble ownership of all that firmware code. It seems to me like Core Devices has contributed a whole lot more than Rebble did, especially for code that actually runs on their new devices rather than code for the old watches. And besides, Core Devices' firmware remains open source, and Rebble is supposed to be receiving payment from Core Devices for the use of the store[1]. There is no "stealing" here.
The narrative that Eric "sold out" the community is transparently ridiculous. His company failed. They ran out of money. It was a failure of business management, not ethics. And the narrative that "he can't even be bothered to give credit" is also transparently false. He credits Rebble all the time. In blog posts, on their website, on social media. And financially by paying them money to use their store.
> It was a failure of business management, not ethics.
Yet he exited in a way that left his customers high and dry. You claim he made no money off of the sale?
> A few contributions don't give Rebble ownership of all that firmware code
I didn't say that it does. Eric chose to fork the codebase that includes those contributions so they clearly added value.
> He credits Rebble all the time.
>> Instead, we’ve built a new open source library called libpebble3. This library is ‘batteries included’ - designed to provide everything you need to build a Pebble companion app except for the UI. It’s a single cross platform (iOS, Android and desktop) codebase written in Kotlin Multi Platform (KMP). We’ve licensed libpebble3 under AGPL-3 with an optional commercial exemption for integration into a proprietary codebase. Learn about this strategy.
I see someone taking credit here, not giving it.
If Eric manages to find a way back on-side with Rebble, he may get abother chance. Otherwise he has already alienated a significant part of his target market.
He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money. I doubt he personally made more than a token amount on the sale, liquidation preferences and all that. If selling out was his goal he could have sold out for a whole lot more money a year prior and chose not to.
> they clearly added value
A tiny amount compared to the whole, Core Devices' own contributions are larger, and the firmware remains open source! Nothing was stolen!
As for Eric giving credit to Rebble:
repebble.com: "This was also made possible by the Rebble team and community, who have supported Pebble since it shut down"
Eric's YouTube: "thanks to the clever work of Liam, one of my past Pebble colleagues and avid Rebble contributor, we switched to using an open source BLE stack called Nimble."
Eric's blog: "thanks to Rebble for keeping everyone engaged with a product that hasn’t been on sale since 2016!"
More on Eric's blog: "For the last 9 years, the Rebble Alliance has been keeping the Pebble dream alive. [...] I’m a huge fan" "Without the community or the OS, there is zero chance that these new watches would be possible! Thank you Rebble!"
Yet more on Eric's blog: "I’d like to thank [...] The Rebble Alliance - they’ve been keeping the Pebble torch lit in the intervening years, and (hopefully) continue nurturing and empowering the community years into the future."
Eric's social media: "Thank you, Google and Rebble! I can't stress how thankful I am to @pebble_dev (http://Rebble.io) and Google, in general and to a few Googlers specifically, for putting in tremendous effort over the last year to make this happen. You've helped keep the dream alive by making it possible for anyone to use, fork and improve PebbleOS. The Rebble team has also done a ton of work over the years to continue supporting Pebble software, appstore and community. Thank you!"
libpebblecommon consists of 5362 lines of Kotlin code. libpebble3 is 25578. Core Devices has done by far the large majority of the work even here, and Eric has heaped copious praise on Rebble repeatedly and consistently. If he didn't specifically write in a blog post that he's specifically thankful for this specific bit of code, that's a really weak criticism.
> libpebblecommon consists of 5362 lines of Kotlin code. libpebble3 is 25578. Core Devices has done by far the large majority of the work even here, and Eric has heaped copious praise on Rebble repeatedly and consistently. If he didn't specifically write in a blog post that he's specifically thankful for this specific bit of code, that's a really weak criticism.
I am sorry but I expect only pointy hair bosses to "measure impact" using lines of code. I expect better from our community.
> He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money.
I don't see how you could possibly know this. Personally, I highly doubt that there was no other possible exit that didn't do a better job of taking care of his customers and supported the community. HE could have open sourced stuff, made sure the app store was backed up, etc.
> the firmware is still open source
Oh, I guess since one thing nobody is complaining about is true, then all their other comlaints are moot.
The value here isn't in the source code, certaibly not in the additions made by a 5 man company. The value is the community that has kept itself alive while maintaining and creating the resources that are giving Core Devices any chance of success.
Nothing was stolen, but a lot of good will was lost.
Edit: I see you've substantially edited your comment without any note yet again.
> They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic.
Scraping data because the original publisher is going under to prevent the data from being lost is very different from scraping data from someone who you are actively trying negotiate with over use of that data.
> It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
The claim was that Rebble paid the developers of NimBLE, Codecoup, to assist with integration of NimBLE into RebbleOS
> The claim was that Rebble paid the developers of NimBLE, Codecoup, to assist with integration of NimBLE into RebbleOS
OK, that claim wasn't actually made in this post. I see in a blog post last month they say "We engaged the services of Codecoup – the maintainers of NimBLE – to help us find a handful of bugs in our implementation of Bluetooth on legacy watches". Core Devices isn't selling legacy watches though, and they've been working on Bluetooth since long before last month. So it's still not clear to me what Bluetooth work Rebble is claiming to have paid for that Core Devices is actually relying on.
Also, in that same post they say "we’ve made it work by agreeing that Core will pay us a reasonable amount to cover our costs and to support the maintenance of Rebble Web Services". So Core is actually supposed to be paying Rebble, they're not just using the store for free. No mention of that in this post...
It's like the maritime laws concerning salvage. Rebble rightfully salvaged a sunk ship. If the ship never sank then Rebble never would have taken possession of it.
I don't think _anyone_ who's buying the new pebble watches is to some degree not interested in software, and probably pretty interested in open-source community work. It's a wildly niche userbase, and this sort of thing is going to put crazy pressure on Eric and co, I imagine.
Still keeping my preorder, but damn dude this kinda sucks.
I wonder if there is a third option. Partner with someone like Pine64 and release your own watches. I find it hard to believe that the market is that big to begin with. If you have a small batch that can attract the tinkers and engineers like us, it’ll be a self fulfilling cycle. More users, more contributors, more income.
Has the Rebble community ever explored their own open source HW for the rebble ecosystem? I know there’s a ton of work involved to get something high quality/consumer grade and there’s obviously cost implications correlated to order volume and we were all hoping Core Devices would offer the goods but maybe we can lean into a community driven model for the hardware as well?
I'd be surprised if more 'hackable' watches didn't pop up around the Sifli chips. Lilygo have an upcoming device with Sifli 52 chip. There's the SF32LB52-ULP smartwatch development board.
The Silfi 52 chip is news to me- thanks for pointing it out (also didn't know it's what is powering the new Core Devices products- pretty cool).
I've built custom firmware for a DIY OLED ESP-32 watch that is made by a few vendors before. In some ways we're emerging into that reality now but I'd admit that what Core Devices is trying to do and the general level of polish of the Pebble ecosystem is a lot further than something like what I'm describing.
> ...Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of business and dropped support for the hundreds of thousands of Pebble smartwatches out there. Rebble – and our community! – put together a Herculean effort to salvage the data that was left on the Pebble app store.
> We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around.
> We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!
it sounds like Rebble scraped the original store, built a new API and storage layer, facilitated the publishing of new apps, and kept old apps updated when external changes would've rendered them otherwise unusable. then tried to work with Eric to reach an agreement where both parties could have a piece of the pie in the relaunch.
I'm pretty sure everything on the Rebble store today is free, but I think the real fight here is about who gets to own the default (only?) storefront that then has the option to offer paid apps/faces... and collect a whatever-percent cut of that forever.
>Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more restrictive license on their contributions and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.
If you look at the link they have for proof, the change was GPLv3 to a dual-license AGPLv3 + not-really-specified license you can privately arrange.
They have to respect the original GPLv3 license, which means that Core has to continue to publish all libpebble3 changes under a GPLv3 compatible license, and they do appear to be doing so, even if they also offer a separate license for sale.
I feel like rebble is phrasing this a little misleadingly too. The neutral phrasing here would be "Pebble forked our work, and per our GPL license is continuing to make all their changes available to all users for free. If you contribute to their repo, not ours, they now require a CLA, and for code they write you can also pay them for a difference license (though it's always also available for free under the GPL)"
There may be something that's real here, but "forked our library and added a CLA" feels normal and expected, not worth hostile phrasing.
The AGPLv3 is for the new code core writes going forward I would assume.
Distributing a mix of AGPL and GPLv3 code is pretty reasonable to do, right, and I think basically all the user's rights under the GPLv3 are being fulfilled just fine.
I agree the commercial license could be dicey, but I assume in reality it's the usual AGPL thing where it's "If you pay, you don't have to comply with the network-services bit, but you now get the code under the GPLv3, so you have to make a network service and ensure your users _never_ get binaries containing this code".
Or, possibly even more realistically, they've put that there and if anyone says "We'll pay $3M for un-encumbered code" they'll rewrite the code from scratch to make it un-encumbered by the old GPL code, and until someone says a number big enough to cover the rewrite they'll never actually do anything.
> Copyright and Licensing
A forward-looking section applying to all new changes going forward I guess.
As long as they've preserved the old copyright notice somewhere, and it's given to users who request it, it doesn't really matter what the README says does it?
I promise I'm not a shill for them. I do think what they're doing comes off as overall not great, but not as "willful GPL violation" (they're still sharing code), and not as egregiously malicious as the blog makes it sound, so the blog author has me a little unsympathetic with their own misleading (in my opinion) phrasing of this stuff.
13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single
combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this
License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work,
but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License,
section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the
combination as such.
Can't they? They're given the option to take the upstream code under the AGPLv3, so if they take the code as AGPLv3, they can incorporate their changes since AGPL and GPL are compatible.
Well, yeah. I'd never really thought about it before, but linus was really prescient in not adopting the or-later clause. This sort of thing would be destructive to linux.
It is, Amazon in particular is famous for this. It's a big part of the ride of "business source licenses" (see recent hububs around redis and hashicorp)
I didn't see a mention of which license, and I am too lazy to check, but depending on the open source license the answer is either Yes!, Yes, or Nobody really can do anything about it most of the time(unless you are willing to sue them).
Yes, this is an attempt to nerd-snipe you into giving a marginally more informed opinion, while also shame you for being too lazy to click a single link, but not too lazy to type an entire comment.
lol didn't mean to come off rude, I just skimmed it and missed it I guess - so the answer in this case is generally no you cannot relicense agpl 3.0 without being an original copyright holder and getting sign offs from all the other holders.
Also generally agpl 3.0 is considered a viral license, so accessing it over a network is considered a form of distribution (which is probably why they dont like it) but relicensing it is just a core "nope" type of thing.
(also dual licensing seems like you're relicensing effectively if the purchaser doesn't have to respect the gpl license, but not as clear to me)
That's my orders (2 watches) cancelled. I don't see Core Devices doing anything good unless it appears to be affecting their bottom line, so I'm voting with my wallet.
Rebble's work is, as far as I can tell, entirely open source. The contents of the database are not, but those contents are predominantly a curation of other people's work, most of which is open source, along with some stats.
I'm having a hard time buying into this argument that any theft is actually occurring. Rebble can keep on doing their thing if they want. Core is free to use their open source (and relicense! but obviously they can't retroactively relicense the prior work, nor can they change the license in Rebble's repos).
To be perfectly honest this reads to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
The fact that any of this even exists -- Rebble, Core, the firmware OSS, the Pebble name again -- feels miraculous. More litigious lawyers could have squashed these things at numerous points.
I feel sorry for the Rebble folks that they feel they're getting the short end of all of this. But that's the beauty of it all, of Open Source.
I do hope that Core and Rebble can find a way to be more harmonious moving forward. And I hope everything continues to be Open Source.
Once again, we have the situation where someone uses an Apache or BSD licence, only to then wonder why others do exactly what the licence allows. If you want others, especially companies, to play nice, you have to make them do so. Use GPL or AGPL.
Let's hope Rebble doesn't get steamrollered. They did good work when the original company failed its users.
Block access to your servers and offer firmware for their watches with access to your servers. Most people who use these watches are nerdy enough to dislike this behavior and able to flash a new firmware.
Unfortunate. I'll wait some days for the response, but it better be a good one.
This behavior from Core may be par for the course, but I can already buy watches from companies that have values only for marketing. It's a small niche, and being nice would not cost much.
And they already died once, without having a proper off-ramp for their users - for now I don't trust them to exist in another two years. (I'm not really sure they even are in this for the long term - talk is cheap.)
So, the response is here. Without a closer look I can't say what's really going on - although I lean toward believing that Core is going in the right direction - but there still seem to be some orange flags.
I already received my Pebble 2 Duo and it's been such a joy to own, but I will definitely be canceling my Pebble Time 2 preorder if Eric keeps acting like this.
Like many others here, I was excited to hear pebble return, and have a Time 2 on preorder, but will be cancelling it if I don't hear a positive outcome from this.
Getting strong The Scorpion and the Frog vibes from this situation. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of a profit-maximising entity. Profit is the gap between how much it can take and how little it can give. It concedes nothing without a demand. Why would it?
The playbook isn't exactly a secret. What you might describe as a "classic walled garden enshittification trap", Peter Thiel and Sam Altman would describe as "monopoly (affectionate)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4 – "proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale", exactly by the book.
I think the bias towards optimism is commendable but I hope this is the wake-up call the community needs to treat "your love is valuable enough to build a business around" as the Faustian bargain it is and keep Core Devices on a short leash. They want to own you, not work with you. It's their nature.
The move from LGPL to Apache/MIT as the default license only _really_ benefit business.
There was a lot of FUD against LGPL that was probably driven by the fact that businesses wanted to slurp up open-source libraries and bundle them into valuable bits of tech without having to contribute back or compensate the library authors.
If that’s true, it’s disappointing to see community efforts reused without credit. Open projects rely on transparency and respect for contributors, so some clarification from both sides would help clear this up.
Wow. Yielding to a benevolent dictator requires a lot of trust, and it seems Eric is doing his best to exhaust any he might have had. Want to hear more from those involved, but seriously considering cancelling my order.
Keeps stealing? Are you sure you aren't winning already? Imagine if all they did was clone your repo and change nothing. That would be maximum theft and yet I somehow doubt that this would have made the rebble guys unhappy.
It really doesn’t make any sense for the central software repository of a new product to be controlled by an independent third party. I would have a lot of concerns about that if i were a user of these new pebbles
The 3rd party has continued to exist when the first party support died the first time. It's the exact opposite, you don't want to buy a device that is tied to some 1st party service. The service can go down and you're stuck with a brick.
It doesn't make sense in isolation, but the first party failed to do this work for the past 10 years and then wants to benefit from a third party who did do the work.
Either the third party should get a seat at the table, or they should start fresh with an empty first party store
I've always considered these people to be scam artists after they promised sapphire crystal faces in the original kickstarter and then shipped cheap garbage.
I wasn't there for the original Pebble, but was that a stretch goal, or the promised specs no matter how many sold? I can understand them not fulfilling a stretch goal even though that's kind of crappy. If it was a promised spec for every watch no matter what, then that is not cool.
Are you sure? I can't find a single mention of this anywhere. And that would have been an extremely aggressive move unrelated to the main point of the watch.
I'm not shocked - Pebble showed their true colors years ago when they ran the kickstarter campaign for the Time 2, which they cancelled and sold out to Fitbit. They never cared about their community.
Is that really an example of not caring about the community? The business failed, and they refunded everyone who had pledged. The sale to Fitbit was probably the way they funded those refunds. That seems like an unfortunate ending but one that indicated some amount of care for the community.
The author sounds exactly like I expect a non-profit director to be asking the community of their opinion. I wish Wikimedia would act like this. I find the author's behavior excellent.
I am the primary author of the current generation Pebble Appstore frontend, the one that maintained the database most of the time, the guy who ran the security, infrastructure, data privacy team, and quite a few things around the Pebble ecosystem over the years. I also was on the team that begrudgingly had to hand it all over to Fitbit in the acquisition.
I have a very strong opinion here.
Any development of Pebble as an ecosystem that is not 100% free open source software and available to the public, is a dick move at this point. It is a dick move if Eric does it in any way, and it is a dick move if the Rebble team does it in any way.
Let Eric or anyone else scrape what they want with the Appstore and wish them luck. Maybe even make a nice JSON export button for people, why not?
Meanwhile those in the community should keep doing what they have always done: Work towards fully open source community first solutions with the full blessing and support of said community.
Proprietary solutions are always a dead end so do not waste any energy fighting them or thinking about them. Just keep pushing to public repos.
FWIIW I have not yet talked to either side about this and we should wait to hear more from the other side before we raise our torches too high.
But regardless of whatever happens with Core Devices and Rebble: Personally, I just want choice and ownership. If Core Devices does not make it hard to compile and load my own firmware from FOSS sources, and so long as there is a short path to interface with new hardware over bluetooth/wifi/lora etc with a FOSS SDK or CLI tools, I am very likely to be a customer and ignore any drama.
The pursuit of more hackability and choice are why I backed Pebble in the first kickstarter, and the lack of total freedom and choice in daily-wear-ready devices in the current market are why I have exclusively used analog watches the past 5+ years.
Am I right in assuming that a large number of different people have contributed to this entire ecosystem throughout the years/decades?
I totally get why you wouldn't want your work to end up silo'd to a specific org if you had created it, intending it to be used by the general user, and not (via) a company.
A commitment to making things available to all, means making them available to those seeking to make profit from your work without giving you any influence.
Rebble was built on borrowed work of others combined with their own and should be willing to pay that forward for anyone else that wants to try out alternative visions for the Pebble ecosystem.
Open source solutions are unkillable so long as a community exists, unlike proprietary solutions. No proprietary solutions by Core Devices are a threat to Rebble.
They should negotiate a big donation for Rebble and shake hands.
Then surely you would not be opposed to Rebble using copy-left OSI compatible license, right?
OSI licenses for all of the things. Make it easy for anyone to stand up their own Rebble infra, data and all, or it is not really free.
If you had sudo permissions on the situation what 10 steps would you want to see happen to resolve this whole affair?
1. All: Put an FOSS license file in every single repo involved and make it public
2. Rebble: Make every database be easy to export as JSON or similar
3. All: Let everyone do what they want
4. Core Devices: Make it easy for devices to point at Core Devices or Rebble services and firmware updates as they like
Could not come up with 6 more steps.
Fighting those with (perceived or real) intention to profit from community work is a waste of energy that can be better spent serving that community.
Best to focus on making people want to run the open source alternatives over any proprietary first party solutions that may or may not emerge.
Update: Response from Eric.
https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-rebble-and-a-path-forward
Lance -- I really like this comment because it is a compelling argument for something other than the viewpoint I hold. Obviously I am not fully convinced by it (yet?). But this is the kind of discussion that we had hoped for in response to this post. Thanks for posting it.
Wow.
> We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.
> We’d already agreed to give Core a license to our database to build a recommendation engine on. Then, Eric said that he instead demanded that we give them all of the data that we’ve curated, unrestricted, for him to do whatever he’d like with. We asked to have a conversation last week; he said that was busy and could meet the following week. Instead, the same day, our logs show that he went and scraped our servers.
Seriously uncool. I don't really consider myself a part of the Pebble community anymore (despite having two of the OG Pebble) but I'd def lean towards getting legal input on this...
Not cool. I can't help but think this must be pretty self-defeating. The market for the Pebble watches is not general consumers who will never see things like this going on in the background, it's relatively technical people who know a lot about the devices they are using, almost by definition. I can only assume that this will be widely known quickly in the customer base.
There may be another side to this story, but it's so far not a good look for Pebble/Core, and this post is well reasoned and written enough that I doubt there are many places for alternate explanations to hide.
I can't edit this comment anymore, but I think there is another side to this that is worth hearing. I stand by my point that openness is likely core to the Pebble customer base, but it's less clear to me now that Rebble are living up to that.
What a mess. Eric, I think you will have some explaining and negotiating to do. You might feel like you don't have the time, but this could soon turn existential for your project. For now I keep my order up, I'm sure there's a way for both of you to reach an agreement that doesn't devalue one or the other party.
For those immediately jumping ship: have some patience and observe. You heard one side of the story that yes, someone was frustrated enough to drag all of this public, but that cannot possibly tell the whole story. Please stop escalating the problem by throwing it all away and instead seek to reach out and steer this around instead.
I dunno how you can represent this any other way. The Rebble people more or less say they did nothing but give stuff away and want to talk. Eric/Core seem to be taking and taking, and giving nothing back.
For what it's worth he IS contributing to libpebble3 at least, but yes most of it is closed
I do get the idea, he wants to build hardware and thus needs to be able to do whatever he wants to the code and not wait for merges but it sucks he seems to probably take it too far, for example not using the Rebble mobile app and instead making his own around the library, that's also closed source
I mean, it’s not that I necessarily blame him for taking stuff that is open source, but giving the impression that you will not sideline the others entirely and then doing so anyway feels icky.
I wouldn’t want to deal with a random open source project while running a company either, but I wouldn’t try to pretend to either, I hope.
That's modern capitalism for you. Sad to see, if there is not proper response in the next few days it's cancel time.
Assuming Eric / Core doesn't come out with some scathing "real story":
Well, it's better to figure this out today (that Eric / Core are not so great) rather than a year or two down the line when I'd have already bought a new Pebble. Still sucks, I was excited. Never had one but I want something in the same niche.
Does anyone have suggestions for other good low-capability, long battery, hackable eink watches?
>Does anyone have suggestions for other good low-capability, long battery, hackable eink watches?
We've been looking for these for years, and never found them. Pebble coming back was the solution that we all dreamed about.
Former Rebble dev here, I've been very happy with the BangleJS. It doesn't meet all of your criteria but the battery lasts me a week and it's more hackable than Pebble ever was.
If you're not looking for a smartwatch, but a hackable digital watch check out sensorwatch.net or other mods that may exist for the Casio F-91W
not eink, but have a look at pinetime
Garmin instinct? as I remember eink and almost month of battery life
> low-capability, long battery, hackable eink watches?
Gadgetbridge works pretty well with Amazfit smart watches, although they are OLED, not eink. Batteries last more than 1 week.
https://gadgetbridge.org/
What a bummer. It seems like what they're asking for here (a written agreement that users will be able to access 3rd party app stores) would be a win win win for Core Devices, Rebble, and users. Core Devices gets to look like a super good guy (ideally driving interest in the product), Rebble gets to look like a huge winner maintaining something for the community (as they are), and users get an open ecosystem.
There's still a chance for a win here, but looks like the door is closing.
I'm new to Pebble and have been excited about joining the community; I have a Pebble Time 2 on preorder. I will certainly cancel the pre-order unless Rebble affirmatively says they are satisfied with the arrangement.
I'm in the exact same position. It's beyond belief that the new (hardware) company wouldn't see itself in long-term collaboration with the community organization (providing services/platform).
Indeed, it bodes rather poorly for the sustainability of Core if they're already behaving like owning everything is critical to satisfying some hypergrowth checkbox. I kind of thought the whole point of the new organization was not to be another startup and to rather to be more like a scaled cottage industry player, making a niche product for nerds and selling it directly to them for a reasonable upfront profit margin rather than depending on collecting rent from a closed app ecosystem to pay the bills.
This is not good.
> We’ll compromise on almost everything else, but our one red line is this: Whatever we agree on, there has to be a future for Rebble in there.
I can see through to the good intentions, but this mindset has a very dangerous sandbagging risk to the other party.
Could you imagine a company forcing you to exclusively use them and only them as a vendor for the foreseeable future? Not just for a single contract, but for many contracts beyond it? Or one especially long contract?
That’s just not fair.
There are some other red flags here too. I am not convinced they have the ability to license a database they themselves scraped, nor if there’s any obligation to merge the particular code changes if any back upstream.
That's not what they're demanding (or at least, that's only one way of giving them what they're demanding).
A legal guarantee that they'll allow people to configure their watches for an alternate app store would probably be sufficient, for instance.
I agree, I think that’s the intended interpretation — but I’m disappointed that’s not their stated redline then, though.
The ask there is for a future in app stores beyond Core Devices, not just for Rebble specifically. That is a call for Core to open their platform; what they have now is a call for Core to open their platform to them.
I'm torn here. I love that Rebble folks have kept things alive. I also love that Eric underwent the effort to make new hardware.
I'm also a bit sad that this is the first we're hearing of this tension, because it likely would've changed my decision to purchase a new Core 2 Duo watch, and I would've preferred this sort of falling out happen before a lot of devices have been purchased.
Can you cancel the preorder? Or is the device you mentioned already out and too old to return? Some credit cards will refund you if terms changed after a purchase as well.
I used Rebble for many years and bought the new Core Devices watches. The truth is Rebble will die without new hardware. It was declining in usage and I myself stopped using it when my old Pebble hardware gave out, until the prospect of new hardware came around.
There needs to be a business making money to build the hardware to support this community. I appreciate that Rebble kept the flame alive, but I support Eric and Core Devices in building a business that makes enough money to fund new development of both hardware and software.
And the hardware is useless without the software... its a smartwatch ecosystem, they need each other, and Core screwing over Rebble is not OK (if it is true)
Only a small part of the software in use here was written by Rebble. They cloned the Pebble app store originally, but the store has no value by itself. What makes it valuable is the catalog of watchfaces and apps, approximately none of which were built by Rebble. They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic. The software on the watch itself is mostly Pebble software with mostly Core Devices modifications. The phone app was written mostly by Core Devices. By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.
It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit and Pebble engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
The android app had stopped working for me a couple of months before the new Pebble came out, so my Old Pebble Time was at EOL, and unusable. The new Pebble app by Core devices made it work again.
Rebble didn't do that. They were effective only keeping the old devices on life support. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome that Rebble came along and extended the life of our Pebbles. I'm siding slightly more with Eric and Co. than with Rebble.
> By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.
The "a month or two" was specifically about the mobile app, not the firmware, dev portal or store data.
To me it seems pretty obvious that Core Devices has benefited and enourmous amount from Rebble's work. The fact that Core Devices seems uninterested in contributing back tells me all I need to know about their ethics.
Rebble didn't write the firmware, just as they didn't write the apps and watchfaces that they scraped from Pebble for their store. Their main contributions were writing a web app to clone the Pebble store and maintaining it for many years, which we are all grateful for. But that doesn't give them ownership of the apps and watchfaces that give the store its value, nor the firmware that was open sourced by Google, which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
> nor the firmware that was open sourced by Google, which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
Yet Eric didn't fork Google's codebase, they forked Rebble's codebase.
> Rebble didn't write the firmware, just as they didn't write the apps and watchfaces
They did work on both. You seem pretty dismissive and one sided here.
> which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
Source?
The official google announcement claims that the code was open sourced "to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016"... which combined with an explicit callout to Rebble later, is a pretty darn clear statement that the code was released because of Rebble, not because of Eric.
Edit: So on one side we gave a community organization that us the only reason such a strong community still exists that has spent longer taking care of the Pebble community that Pebble the company existed. On the otherside we have an individual who has already sold out the community once, who is trying to start another company by extracting the sweat equity of the organization that rescued his community from his choices. While doing this, he can't even be bothered to give credit to that organization for the massive opensource headstart they gave his mobile app or other efforts. Instead HE tries to take full credit for opensourcing his derivative work.
Edit: So while I agree that the Pebble community needs a for profit hardware partner, I no longer believe that parter can be Core Devices or led by Eric due to a lack of trust and ethics.
Look, even Rebble's own blog post about the open sourcing says "a massive shout out to Eric Migicovsky for ensuring this happened". It is clear that he was the driving force that started the process inside Google that allowed it to suddenly happen after all these years.
Rebble did some work on the open source firmware in the four months between when Google opened it and Core Devices forked. It's a very small amount compared to the bulk of the whole firmware, which was originally developed by Eric's company, let's not forget. A few months of contributions don't give Rebble ownership of all that firmware code. It seems to me like Core Devices has contributed a whole lot more than Rebble did, especially for code that actually runs on their new devices rather than code for the old watches. And besides, Core Devices' firmware remains open source, and Rebble is supposed to be receiving payment from Core Devices for the use of the store[1]. There is no "stealing" here.
The narrative that Eric "sold out" the community is transparently ridiculous. His company failed. They ran out of money. It was a failure of business management, not ethics. And the narrative that "he can't even be bothered to give credit" is also transparently false. He credits Rebble all the time. In blog posts, on their website, on social media. And financially by paying them money to use their store.
[1] https://rebble.io/2025/10/09/rebbles-in-a-world-with-core.ht...
Would there even be a Pebble reboot if there wasn't a community around the watch and projects like Rebble?
> It was a failure of business management, not ethics.
Yet he exited in a way that left his customers high and dry. You claim he made no money off of the sale?
> A few contributions don't give Rebble ownership of all that firmware code
I didn't say that it does. Eric chose to fork the codebase that includes those contributions so they clearly added value.
> He credits Rebble all the time.
>> Instead, we’ve built a new open source library called libpebble3. This library is ‘batteries included’ - designed to provide everything you need to build a Pebble companion app except for the UI. It’s a single cross platform (iOS, Android and desktop) codebase written in Kotlin Multi Platform (KMP). We’ve licensed libpebble3 under AGPL-3 with an optional commercial exemption for integration into a proprietary codebase. Learn about this strategy.
I see someone taking credit here, not giving it.
If Eric manages to find a way back on-side with Rebble, he may get abother chance. Otherwise he has already alienated a significant part of his target market.
He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money. I doubt he personally made more than a token amount on the sale, liquidation preferences and all that. If selling out was his goal he could have sold out for a whole lot more money a year prior and chose not to.
> they clearly added value
A tiny amount compared to the whole, Core Devices' own contributions are larger, and the firmware remains open source! Nothing was stolen!
As for Eric giving credit to Rebble:
repebble.com: "This was also made possible by the Rebble team and community, who have supported Pebble since it shut down"
Eric's YouTube: "thanks to the clever work of Liam, one of my past Pebble colleagues and avid Rebble contributor, we switched to using an open source BLE stack called Nimble."
Eric's blog: "thanks to Rebble for keeping everyone engaged with a product that hasn’t been on sale since 2016!"
More on Eric's blog: "For the last 9 years, the Rebble Alliance has been keeping the Pebble dream alive. [...] I’m a huge fan" "Without the community or the OS, there is zero chance that these new watches would be possible! Thank you Rebble!"
Yet more on Eric's blog: "I’d like to thank [...] The Rebble Alliance - they’ve been keeping the Pebble torch lit in the intervening years, and (hopefully) continue nurturing and empowering the community years into the future."
Eric's social media: "Thank you, Google and Rebble! I can't stress how thankful I am to @pebble_dev (http://Rebble.io) and Google, in general and to a few Googlers specifically, for putting in tremendous effort over the last year to make this happen. You've helped keep the dream alive by making it possible for anyone to use, fork and improve PebbleOS. The Rebble team has also done a ton of work over the years to continue supporting Pebble software, appstore and community. Thank you!"
> Eric giving credit to Rebble
In which one of those quotes does Eric acknowledge how much his app owes to the work done by Rebble on libpebblecommon?
libpebblecommon consists of 5362 lines of Kotlin code. libpebble3 is 25578. Core Devices has done by far the large majority of the work even here, and Eric has heaped copious praise on Rebble repeatedly and consistently. If he didn't specifically write in a blog post that he's specifically thankful for this specific bit of code, that's a really weak criticism.
> libpebblecommon consists of 5362 lines of Kotlin code. libpebble3 is 25578. Core Devices has done by far the large majority of the work even here, and Eric has heaped copious praise on Rebble repeatedly and consistently. If he didn't specifically write in a blog post that he's specifically thankful for this specific bit of code, that's a really weak criticism.
I am sorry but I expect only pointy hair bosses to "measure impact" using lines of code. I expect better from our community.
> He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money.
I don't see how you could possibly know this. Personally, I highly doubt that there was no other possible exit that didn't do a better job of taking care of his customers and supported the community. HE could have open sourced stuff, made sure the app store was backed up, etc.
> the firmware is still open source
Oh, I guess since one thing nobody is complaining about is true, then all their other comlaints are moot.
The value here isn't in the source code, certaibly not in the additions made by a 5 man company. The value is the community that has kept itself alive while maintaining and creating the resources that are giving Core Devices any chance of success.
Nothing was stolen, but a lot of good will was lost.
Edit: I see you've substantially edited your comment without any note yet again.
> They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic.
Scraping data because the original publisher is going under to prevent the data from being lost is very different from scraping data from someone who you are actively trying negotiate with over use of that data.
> It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
The claim was that Rebble paid the developers of NimBLE, Codecoup, to assist with integration of NimBLE into RebbleOS
> The claim was that Rebble paid the developers of NimBLE, Codecoup, to assist with integration of NimBLE into RebbleOS
OK, that claim wasn't actually made in this post. I see in a blog post last month they say "We engaged the services of Codecoup – the maintainers of NimBLE – to help us find a handful of bugs in our implementation of Bluetooth on legacy watches". Core Devices isn't selling legacy watches though, and they've been working on Bluetooth since long before last month. So it's still not clear to me what Bluetooth work Rebble is claiming to have paid for that Core Devices is actually relying on.
Also, in that same post they say "we’ve made it work by agreeing that Core will pay us a reasonable amount to cover our costs and to support the maintenance of Rebble Web Services". So Core is actually supposed to be paying Rebble, they're not just using the store for free. No mention of that in this post...
It's like the maritime laws concerning salvage. Rebble rightfully salvaged a sunk ship. If the ship never sank then Rebble never would have taken possession of it.
I don't think _anyone_ who's buying the new pebble watches is to some degree not interested in software, and probably pretty interested in open-source community work. It's a wildly niche userbase, and this sort of thing is going to put crazy pressure on Eric and co, I imagine.
Still keeping my preorder, but damn dude this kinda sucks.
Pretty damning. There goes any interest I had in the Pebble revival until this is sorted fairly.
I wonder if there is a third option. Partner with someone like Pine64 and release your own watches. I find it hard to believe that the market is that big to begin with. If you have a small batch that can attract the tinkers and engineers like us, it’ll be a self fulfilling cycle. More users, more contributors, more income.
Rebble did have a hardware project when I looked into the community, but I think they lacked the resources to get very far with it.
A bummer in my opinion because they probably have the understanding of what makes a good smartwatch that most of the industry seems to lack.
Oh... oh no :(
I was really looking forward to my pre-ordered Time 2, as a Pebble Steel then Time Round owner.
But you cannot do this to Rebble. You just can't, this is unacceptable. Cancelling my preorder :(
Has the Rebble community ever explored their own open source HW for the rebble ecosystem? I know there’s a ton of work involved to get something high quality/consumer grade and there’s obviously cost implications correlated to order volume and we were all hoping Core Devices would offer the goods but maybe we can lean into a community driven model for the hardware as well?
I'd be surprised if more 'hackable' watches didn't pop up around the Sifli chips. Lilygo have an upcoming device with Sifli 52 chip. There's the SF32LB52-ULP smartwatch development board.
The Silfi 52 chip is news to me- thanks for pointing it out (also didn't know it's what is powering the new Core Devices products- pretty cool).
I've built custom firmware for a DIY OLED ESP-32 watch that is made by a few vendors before. In some ways we're emerging into that reality now but I'd admit that what Core Devices is trying to do and the general level of polish of the Pebble ecosystem is a lot further than something like what I'm describing.
The behavior of the Pebble company has not sat right with me since I discovered the following things way back when:
- You can’t directly access the microphone audio
- They don’t sell replacement parts
A bad look for a “hacker watch” and apparently not a fluke. Oh, and they just dropped all of their users when they sold themselves to Fitbit.
Rebble have demonstrated great stewardship of the ecosystem, Eric has not. My trust is with Rebble.
That said: It was Core Devices who made my watch work again on iOS, the Rebble project for this never materialized.
What is this data that Core wants exactly? Are old pebble apps compatible with the new devices?
Edit: under what license did rebble scrape the app code? Couldn’t Core Devices scrape it from rebble under the same logic?
> ...Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of business and dropped support for the hundreds of thousands of Pebble smartwatches out there. Rebble – and our community! – put together a Herculean effort to salvage the data that was left on the Pebble app store.
> We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around.
> We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!
it sounds like Rebble scraped the original store, built a new API and storage layer, facilitated the publishing of new apps, and kept old apps updated when external changes would've rendered them otherwise unusable. then tried to work with Eric to reach an agreement where both parties could have a piece of the pie in the relaunch.
I'm pretty sure everything on the Rebble store today is free, but I think the real fight here is about who gets to own the default (only?) storefront that then has the option to offer paid apps/faces... and collect a whatever-percent cut of that forever.
Yes
>Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more restrictive license on their contributions and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.
Is that legal?
I'm not a lawyer, but looks totally fine to me.
If you look at the link they have for proof, the change was GPLv3 to a dual-license AGPLv3 + not-really-specified license you can privately arrange.
They have to respect the original GPLv3 license, which means that Core has to continue to publish all libpebble3 changes under a GPLv3 compatible license, and they do appear to be doing so, even if they also offer a separate license for sale.
I feel like rebble is phrasing this a little misleadingly too. The neutral phrasing here would be "Pebble forked our work, and per our GPL license is continuing to make all their changes available to all users for free. If you contribute to their repo, not ours, they now require a CLA, and for code they write you can also pay them for a difference license (though it's always also available for free under the GPL)"
There may be something that's real here, but "forked our library and added a CLA" feels normal and expected, not worth hostile phrasing.
Wait a sec. IANAL, but if I license something to you under the GPLv3, you may not license it to someone else under AGPLv3 or a commercial license.
That being said, libpebblecommon seems to be Apache 2.0. But this part of the diff seems questionable:
> # Copyright and Licensing
Copyright 2025 Core Devices LLC
How does Core own the copyright to this code?
The AGPLv3 is for the new code core writes going forward I would assume.
Distributing a mix of AGPL and GPLv3 code is pretty reasonable to do, right, and I think basically all the user's rights under the GPLv3 are being fulfilled just fine.
I agree the commercial license could be dicey, but I assume in reality it's the usual AGPL thing where it's "If you pay, you don't have to comply with the network-services bit, but you now get the code under the GPLv3, so you have to make a network service and ensure your users _never_ get binaries containing this code".
Or, possibly even more realistically, they've put that there and if anyone says "We'll pay $3M for un-encumbered code" they'll rewrite the code from scratch to make it un-encumbered by the old GPL code, and until someone says a number big enough to cover the rewrite they'll never actually do anything.
> Copyright and Licensing
A forward-looking section applying to all new changes going forward I guess.
As long as they've preserved the old copyright notice somewhere, and it's given to users who request it, it doesn't really matter what the README says does it?
I promise I'm not a shill for them. I do think what they're doing comes off as overall not great, but not as "willful GPL violation" (they're still sharing code), and not as egregiously malicious as the blog makes it sound, so the blog author has me a little unsympathetic with their own misleading (in my opinion) phrasing of this stuff.
> Wait a sec. IANAL, but if I license something to you under the GPLv3, you may not license it to someone else under AGPLv3 or a commercial license.
Not exactly the above case, but from the GNU GPL version 3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt):
Since it's a more restrictive license, they can't merge back the changes.
Can't they? They're given the option to take the upstream code under the AGPLv3, so if they take the code as AGPLv3, they can incorporate their changes since AGPL and GPL are compatible.
Well, yeah. I'd never really thought about it before, but linus was really prescient in not adopting the or-later clause. This sort of thing would be destructive to linux.
It is, Amazon in particular is famous for this. It's a big part of the ride of "business source licenses" (see recent hububs around redis and hashicorp)
And Elastic: https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/opensearch
I didn't see a mention of which license, and I am too lazy to check, but depending on the open source license the answer is either Yes!, Yes, or Nobody really can do anything about it most of the time(unless you are willing to sue them).
> I am too lazy to check
Literally linked in the article at exactly the words in the quote you're replying to.
They link to this as their proof: https://github.com/coredevices/libpebble3/commit/35853d45cd0...
Yes, this is an attempt to nerd-snipe you into giving a marginally more informed opinion, while also shame you for being too lazy to click a single link, but not too lazy to type an entire comment.
lol didn't mean to come off rude, I just skimmed it and missed it I guess - so the answer in this case is generally no you cannot relicense agpl 3.0 without being an original copyright holder and getting sign offs from all the other holders.
Also generally agpl 3.0 is considered a viral license, so accessing it over a network is considered a form of distribution (which is probably why they dont like it) but relicensing it is just a core "nope" type of thing.
(also dual licensing seems like you're relicensing effectively if the purchaser doesn't have to respect the gpl license, but not as clear to me)
Looks like it went from Apache license to dual AGPLv3 and commercial.
I think apache is fine for commercial use.
It seems to me the terms of the apache license weren't followed? In there it says to include the apache license file, not throw it away.
(I am not a lawyer)
AGPLv3 seems decent - if you run it on a server, the users of that server can get the software I think.
That's my orders (2 watches) cancelled. I don't see Core Devices doing anything good unless it appears to be affecting their bottom line, so I'm voting with my wallet.
If things get sorted, I can order again
Bummer. I preordered a Time 2 but I'll just cancel if the company is going to screw over the community that kept them alive.
I read the whole post and all the links.
Rebble's work is, as far as I can tell, entirely open source. The contents of the database are not, but those contents are predominantly a curation of other people's work, most of which is open source, along with some stats.
I'm having a hard time buying into this argument that any theft is actually occurring. Rebble can keep on doing their thing if they want. Core is free to use their open source (and relicense! but obviously they can't retroactively relicense the prior work, nor can they change the license in Rebble's repos).
To be perfectly honest this reads to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
The fact that any of this even exists -- Rebble, Core, the firmware OSS, the Pebble name again -- feels miraculous. More litigious lawyers could have squashed these things at numerous points.
I feel sorry for the Rebble folks that they feel they're getting the short end of all of this. But that's the beauty of it all, of Open Source.
I do hope that Core and Rebble can find a way to be more harmonious moving forward. And I hope everything continues to be Open Source.
Once again, we have the situation where someone uses an Apache or BSD licence, only to then wonder why others do exactly what the licence allows. If you want others, especially companies, to play nice, you have to make them do so. Use GPL or AGPL.
Let's hope Rebble doesn't get steamrollered. They did good work when the original company failed its users.
Block access to your servers and offer firmware for their watches with access to your servers. Most people who use these watches are nerdy enough to dislike this behavior and able to flash a new firmware.
Unfortunate. I'll wait some days for the response, but it better be a good one.
This behavior from Core may be par for the course, but I can already buy watches from companies that have values only for marketing. It's a small niche, and being nice would not cost much.
And they already died once, without having a proper off-ramp for their users - for now I don't trust them to exist in another two years. (I'm not really sure they even are in this for the long term - talk is cheap.)
So, the response is here. Without a closer look I can't say what's really going on - although I lean toward believing that Core is going in the right direction - but there still seem to be some orange flags.
It sounds like theres room for a deal here; multiple app stores are very trendy right now :)
My preorder is definitely on the line if this doesn't get fixed.
Response thread:
Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969250
I already received my Pebble 2 Duo and it's been such a joy to own, but I will definitely be canceling my Pebble Time 2 preorder if Eric keeps acting like this.
That's a bummer. I have a time 2 pre-ordered and was looking forward to using it.
So far no response from Eric. If it won't be a good one, I'll cancel the preorder.
Same here, I’ll cancel this week if there is no satisfactory response.
Like many others here, I was excited to hear pebble return, and have a Time 2 on preorder, but will be cancelling it if I don't hear a positive outcome from this.
Getting strong The Scorpion and the Frog vibes from this situation. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of a profit-maximising entity. Profit is the gap between how much it can take and how little it can give. It concedes nothing without a demand. Why would it?
The playbook isn't exactly a secret. What you might describe as a "classic walled garden enshittification trap", Peter Thiel and Sam Altman would describe as "monopoly (affectionate)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4 – "proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale", exactly by the book.
I think the bias towards optimism is commendable but I hope this is the wake-up call the community needs to treat "your love is valuable enough to build a business around" as the Faustian bargain it is and keep Core Devices on a short leash. They want to own you, not work with you. It's their nature.
This gives me Highschool „I can change him“ energy.
Negotiation and compromise has its place but if someone negotiates by only taking you bail
The move from LGPL to Apache/MIT as the default license only _really_ benefit business.
There was a lot of FUD against LGPL that was probably driven by the fact that businesses wanted to slurp up open-source libraries and bundle them into valuable bits of tech without having to contribute back or compensate the library authors.
That's why the GPL license was created.
If that’s true, it’s disappointing to see community efforts reused without credit. Open projects rely on transparency and respect for contributors, so some clarification from both sides would help clear this up.
Very uncool of Eric! Thank you for the work you've put in over the years.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Fairly certain the Rebble folk know the answer they'll get from their users.
I'm certain the EFF would probably be very interested in pursuing this.
> Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Unrelated but this always reminds me of the Bushism "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... can't get fooled again!".
Wow. Yielding to a benevolent dictator requires a lot of trust, and it seems Eric is doing his best to exhaust any he might have had. Want to hear more from those involved, but seriously considering cancelling my order.
I'm now considering canceling my pre-order. I want the Pebble ecosystem to succeed, but I won't buy another closed-source device.
Keeps stealing? Are you sure you aren't winning already? Imagine if all they did was clone your repo and change nothing. That would be maximum theft and yet I somehow doubt that this would have made the rebble guys unhappy.
eric, you make aesthetic experiences. you're not endeavoring to make a giant company, you're making the doughnut shop (https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/restaurants/article/georges...).
nobody needs a watch. don't be greedy.
It really doesn’t make any sense for the central software repository of a new product to be controlled by an independent third party. I would have a lot of concerns about that if i were a user of these new pebbles
The 3rd party has continued to exist when the first party support died the first time. It's the exact opposite, you don't want to buy a device that is tied to some 1st party service. The service can go down and you're stuck with a brick.
It doesn't make sense in isolation, but the first party failed to do this work for the past 10 years and then wants to benefit from a third party who did do the work. Either the third party should get a seat at the table, or they should start fresh with an empty first party store
I've always considered these people to be scam artists after they promised sapphire crystal faces in the original kickstarter and then shipped cheap garbage.
I wasn't there for the original Pebble, but was that a stretch goal, or the promised specs no matter how many sold? I can understand them not fulfilling a stretch goal even though that's kind of crappy. If it was a promised spec for every watch no matter what, then that is not cool.
Are you sure? I can't find a single mention of this anywhere. And that would have been an extremely aggressive move unrelated to the main point of the watch.
I'm not shocked - Pebble showed their true colors years ago when they ran the kickstarter campaign for the Time 2, which they cancelled and sold out to Fitbit. They never cared about their community.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
Is that really an example of not caring about the community? The business failed, and they refunded everyone who had pledged. The sale to Fitbit was probably the way they funded those refunds. That seems like an unfortunate ending but one that indicated some amount of care for the community.
The timeline of the campaign makes it pretty clear that either:
1) they knew they were insolvent, and wouldn’t be able to continue
or
2) the campaign was used to demonstrate market demand to enable their sale to Fitbit
Edit: also, they sold for $23 million [1], total pledges were for about $13 million, and not everyone got a refund [2]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fitbit-bought-pebble-for-23-...
[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
Shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone that followed them since the Allerta days.
The author sounds like a pushover who can't stand up for themselves.
The author sounds exactly like I expect a non-profit director to be asking the community of their opinion. I wish Wikimedia would act like this. I find the author's behavior excellent.
The author of the Rebble post?