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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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?

There's still a chance for a win here, but looks like the door is closing.

> 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'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.

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.

Still keeping my preorder, but damn dude this kinda sucks.

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 :(

- 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.

Edit: under what license did rebble scrape the app code? Couldn’t Core Devices scrape it from rebble under the same logic?

If things get sorted, I can order again

Is that legal?

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.

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.

Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969250

Let's hope Rebble doesn't get steamrollered. They did good work when the original company failed its users.

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.)

My preorder is definitely on the line if this doesn't get fixed.

So far no response from Eric. If it won't be a good one, I'll cancel the preorder.

Negotiation and compromise has its place but if someone negotiates by only taking you bail

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.

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.

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.

nobody needs a watch. don't be greedy.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...