Rebble effectively had free reign on this ecosystem for years, and could have at any time decided to try and capitalize on it further. They still can! But instead they're apparently interested in rent seeking while Core makes real headway.

It's clear that Eric and Core want to make something now. It's not clear what Rebble wants, but it's clear they are feeling left out. That obviously sucks but it's clear from what both sides are saying that Core has been trying to involve Rebble in their efforts. That's certainly noble and I'm not sure others would do the same.

Would Eric be able to do this all without Rebble? Lots of commenters have been saying "no" but I'm skeptic. I was an early Pebble user. I stopped using it before they went bust, and while I was aware of Rebble, there was nothing compelling there for me. It's neat that they have maintained a copy of the original watchfaces but beyond that I don't perceive a ton of value. I don't like the subscription fee. I'm sad they never took a serious crack at making a Rebble watch.

I hope everyone finds a way forward, together, but I'm not optimistic.

Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.

Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.

Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.

My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.

I personally understand Rebble fears, for example when we forked and kept development under Core Github. However, I think we tried to be as transparent as possible and explained the reasons behind. While Liam (ex-Pebble) did an excellent job integrating NimBLE, it is also true that we also offered to do the work. However he had more availability by then to do so. At the same time, we fixed quite a few bugs after integration, or implemented many missing non-trivial features to make it functional. If you also check Github statistics, you will see that as of today ~93% of commits are from Core employees or paid contractors.

All development is happening in the open, and released under Apache-2.0 license. This is an exception in the industry, specially for core product components. It is also common for companies to fork when developing new products because you need to move fast (check our commit rate!). Think about Linux, can you use upstream Kernel on most new ARM SoCs? No. Core took a risk here because Rebble could have kept adding new features, adding overhead for us with upmerges. Reality is that Rebble repository has been dead since we forked. Nobody except Core, and Liam were contributing by then.

Another fear I've heard is about PebbleOS being sold to another company. Well, the company doing that would be pretty dumb as they could clone it for 0$. And thanks to Apache-2.0, they could even add new proprietary features! Not only that, but if Core winds up, the IP will stay open forever!

I think the best, fair long-term solution is to join a well established OSS organization. Rebble lacks many formalities that are common in many OSS projects: board elections, open and regular meetings, public accounts, voting rules, etc. This makes it a dysfunctional community to me. It is up to Rebble to fix these problems or join forces in a new OSS org. Core can't do much more than that. It is also not bad that the two parts have different views, e.g. Core may think a local voice-to-text model is better but Rebble may disagree because that could imply a revenue loss. That's unavoidable, in the end, people could choose at that point.

If Core sells or otherwise goes bad, I want it to be impossible, legally or technically, for them to take functionality away. I want them bound by an agreement such that their hardware can load third-party versions of PebbleOS, the app can be replaced with other compatible apps, any web services can be swapped out without reverse engineering effort, and uploaded apps/watchfaces/etc are shared between backends so no party can attempt to create walled garden.

I think some of these are already addressed informally, but now that trust seems low I'd like to see something more formal. I do not want to see a world where Core pulls an Android and starts shipping a proprietary version of PebbleOS that apps start depending on a la Google Play Services. I do not want to see a world where Rebble or Core can restrict access to their app library. I also don't want to see a world where an overly restrictive deal means that Core can't ship on-device speech-to-text or weather services.

I realize the big issue that blocks this sort of app sharing is probably the existence of commercial/proprietary apps. If all the backends share apps freely, how could payments be handled? It's probably technically possible but very difficult. Personally I don't think this little hobby watch ecosystem would be made much poorer if it went the F-Droid route and required all apps be open and free. We're already relying on hobbyists for pretty much all apps and faces, and having the whole thing be open seems to fit the general hackable community-driven ethos Pebble is built on. Not having paid apps and IAPs would also dodge the temptation to go the modern Apple route of becoming a broker/services company.

That's putting aside how gross it is for your personal comms to leak in public when you might be a little more candid about what's going on.

How can you trust someone who's willing to violate your privacy like that?

The whole drama is interesting as an outsider, but I can't be left without feeling that newPebble is trying to jump start a commercial venture via shortcuts.

Rebble was never going to change the world but they seemed to be very good at maintaining status quo + many small benefits and just reliably serving that.

> Accusation 4: ‘[Eric] scraped our app store, in violation of the agreement that we reached with him previously’

> Here’s what happened. I wanted to highlight some of my favourite watchfaces on the Pebble Appstore. Last Monday Nov 10, after I put my kids to sleep and between long calls with factories in Asia, I started building a webapp to help me quickly go through Pebble Appstore and decide which were my top picks.

> Let me be crystal clear - my little webapp did not download apps or ‘scrape’ anything from Rebble. The webapp displayed the name of each watchface and screenshots and let me click on my favs. I used it to manually look through 6000 watchfaces with my own eyes. I still have 7,000 to go. Post your server logs, they will match up identically to the app I (well…Claude) wrote (source code here)

so it wasn't "scraping"...it was just a vibe-coded webapp that made at least 6,000 requests to Rebble's servers in a short period of time? possibly more, depending on how many intermediate versions of the app he tested, and possibly many more, if one of those intermediate versions had a vibe-coded "feature" like prefetching a bunch of data for performance reasons?

he agreed not to scrape their services. and then scraped their services. and his excuse seems to boil down to "but I was doing it for a cool reason"

and he tosses in completely unrelated details about putting his kids to bed and having long calls with factories in Asia. those seem calculated to make him sound more relatable - an honest, hardworking, humble family man.

this seems like a relatively minor point in the overall dispute, but if he's unwilling or unable to take any responsibility there, it doesn't boost my confidence that he's being honest about the rest of it.

Rebble has valid concerns about the ecosystem surviving beyond Core. Their concerns about the closed-source parts of what Core has developed is valid (WRT the Core app frontend) and Eric positioning himself as a "benevolent dictator" is a reasonable red flag to raise. The next dictator (in case of acquisition) may not be so benevolent.

But while their stewardship of the app store and continuance of services is laudable, they can't really justifiably cry foul when someone "scrapes" their archive of mostly-scraped (from the original store) content.

Hopefully this teaches both sides that an open ecosystem means operating in the open. Which means making all source available not hiding vital components, and also not squawking about someone scraping the store.

Here's what it offers:

* Screen is fully visible under direct sunlight

* With the screen always on the battery lasts me well over a week

* Heart rate monitor

* EXTREMELY hackable, everything can be hacked on with JS, even the launcher you're using for apps

* 108 Euros shipped to the US

* Fully supported by GadgetBridge (open source mobile app)

https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

I'm not a Pebble user, so I don't know how the app install process works, but can't Core just create their own store from scratch, not based on the existing app catalogue, and have that coexist as an alternative option to Rebble? Then users who want access to that extensive back catalogue can use Rebble's store. Let developers and users pick the stores they want to publish to and download from, respectively.

Given that Core is a commercial enterprise, it doesn't seem appropriate for them to rely on apps that were scraped from the original Pebble store. Core is a separate commercial entity from the original Pebble, and doesn't inherit the relationships between original Pebble and the developers which published to their store. By creating a store from scratch, Core can reestablish each of those relationships one by one. That would go a long way towards helping Core build back whatever trust they may have lost (it seems some users are still bitter about the original closure of Pebble, and I don't blame them). Otherwise, what you have is a commercial entity profiting off of a bunch of applications for which they don't own the right to distribute.

As a developer myself, I might be ok with my app being archived due to an emergency situation... but having that app be republished by a commercial entity is a red line.

I don't have an ethical problem with the back catalogue existing, but it should be hosted by a non-profit. Core can position it's store as an place for new, or updated apps that are being actively maintained by developers, which is definitely a selling point. Rebble can position it's store as a back catalogue of apps that existed on the original pebble, offered on an as-is basis. Which is also a selling point, because who knows what great gems you might find in there...

Isn't this the exact point of copyleft licenses?

Relicense PebbleOS as GPL, relicense Rebble as AGPL.

Problem is then solved, no?

Looks like they were not consulted by Eric before this post.

Eric wants the App Store data.

Rebble doesn’t want all their work used to enrich a company that has already failed once at the expense of the work they have put in.

It seems like both parties somehow feel like they’re holding the winning hand and can bend the other to their will.

Neither party seems to realize they’re dependent on the other for their success.

Both sides are slinging mud, and everyone is losing.

I hate to say this but I have to agree with Eric. I want to side with Rebble But they are clearly misguided. The goal should not be to have an ongoing revenue stream for Rebble.

The goals should be

If and when Eric sells out again, there is a way for

1. all pebble and core devices to continue to get updates somehow (Rebble or otherwise)

2. all apps and metadata will continue to be available somehow (Rebble or otherwise)

The otherwise is key here. If someone wants to not use Rebble, they should be able to do that.

Rebble is not the end goal. Core is not the end goal. The users are.

Reselling open source content is always going to be bad taste.

https://fedi.foxgirl.engineering/notes/af9hg38j9iwa221x

I had owned two of the original pebbles, but I honestly think this looks bad on everyone and will gladly ignore every future article on either of these two groups.

I'd definitely have doubts about the partnership too

Was I the only one to get excited when I saw "time round" in a sentence written on Eric's blog? It took a second for me to realize this had nothing to do with the amazing PTR.

That must be making Rebble upset?

There are undoubtedly those preach GPL 3 and AGPL zealous control freakery but it's pretending to be "free" while dictating what can and can't be done with code. If the agreement attempts to discriminate against users selectively, it ain't free or open. GPL 2 is the line in the sand.

The reason why I cancel my pre-order now is I a clear (to me) sign that we have a "it's only software, I'm building the the important part here" situation -the same reason why I won't by a boox product until they change their mind.

The moment I'll come back will be the one when a significant part of the money you spend on a Pebble will automatically go into the software ecosystem (which makes Pebble for $200+ interesting in the first place) and it's easy to see how this money is spent.

I'm also 'scraping' content for my personal projects when I just need the data, but Eric is building a business here, and there had been a valid and clearly communicated suspicion about Eric acting like "goodbye fools, and thanks for the fish". And he agreed not to do so and he lied. How can I know I'm not buying $225 brick supported only by a single person who ditched the community?

It's going to be interesting to see what happens when solid state batteries become available and increase how much energy you can store in a watch. They're high cost, but if you're powering a watch, not a car, probably affordable. That could make standalone watches more effective. Maybe eliminate the need to carry a phone all the time.