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Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

ericmigi.com

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Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#51

Post by radlad »

eptcyka wrote: post #37
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also weather and voice recognition services. If implemented with third party APIs those costs can add up.

Cool, it is imperative those services are not operated at a loss. If you choose to do charity, you best make peace with the fact that you will never get either the time nor the money back.

I don't think they were operating as a charity - they were charging for the features that cost them money to provide... that's how they spent the aforementioned money.

They funded some software development, they paid hosting bills, and they paid third party services for weather data, etc.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#52

Post by weinzierl »

cookiengineer wrote: post #22

If nobody trusts either party to keep up their end of the bargain, why not solve it with licensing? Isn't this the exact point of copyleft licenses? Relicense PebbleOS as GPL, relicense Rebble as AGPL. Problem is then solved, no?

Almost. The excessive CLA had to go too (or be replaced by a DCO).

CLAs may have a place, but as long as they hadn't planned on a bait and switch all along they wouldn't need a CLA literally copied from Oracle's playbook.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#53

Post by eptcyka »

radlad wrote: post #51
eptcyka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, it is imperative those services are not operated at a loss. If you choose to do charity, you best make peace with the fact that you will never get either the time nor the money back.

I don't think they were operating as a charity - they were charging for the features that cost them money to provide... that's how they spent the aforementioned money. They funded some software development, they paid hosting bills, and they paid third party services for weather data, etc.

So they cashflowed the services they provided. And they’re not hunderds of thousands of dollars out of pocket on this, right? So what are they complaining about? Are they worried about losing their revenue stream or what?

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#54

Post by apparent »

margalabargala wrote: post #45
pokoleo wrote: post #9

Summarizing the dispute, for anyone interested: 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…

> 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. It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did. Rebble took the original open-source Pebble work of thousands of independent develo…

> Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.

Looks like Rebble is now a nonprofit?

> have evolved along the way from a loose collection of co-conspirators, to Rebble Alliance, LLC, to our current non-profit Rebble Foundation [1]

1: https://rebble.io/2025/10/09/rebbles-in-a-world-with-core.ht...

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#55

Post by radlad »

eptcyka wrote: post #53
radlad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they were operating as a charity - they were charging for the features that cost them money to provide... that's how they spent the aforementioned money. They funded some software development, they paid hosting bills, and they paid third party services for weather data, etc.

So they cashflowed the services they provided. And they’re not hunderds of thousands of dollars out of pocket on this, right? So what are they complaining about? Are they worried about losing their revenue stream or what?

This thread started with OP calling Pebble rentseeking and used the subscription services as an example. I replied to point out that the subscription fees were used to fund services and development - they weren't profit. Then the thread went off the rails with some claiming that spending money is proof that Rebble is incompetent and others claiming that they shouldn't be whining about spending money (which they weren't) and I'm no longer clear what point you are trying to make.

Stated elsewhere in thread, I believe the primary concern is that Rebble will import the data into a separate, closed app store owned by Pebble, which Pebble will lock Rebble out of (i.e. block scraping and refuse to release this data), and then if Pebble goes bust again, Rebble is left with less than they started with.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#56

Post by apparent »

evil-olive wrote: post #47

this part of the response doesn't pass the smell test for me: > 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…

I think the key question is whether the automated actions resulted in information being retained by Pebble. If it was just going through a motion and pulling some data (or pulling all data but only keeping some of it), then that would be consistent with Eric's story and not be the kind of scraping that Rebble is worried about. They're worried about the content being archived somewhere else, and they seem to think that happened. But did it?

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#57

Post by shreddit »

margalabargala wrote: post #45
pokoleo wrote: post #9

Summarizing the dispute, for anyone interested: 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…

> 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. It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did. Rebble took the original open-source Pebble work of thousands of independent develo…

Rebble sounds pretty much like a non profit to me

> The Rebble Foundation is a non-profit organization that keeps the Pebble community alive. rebble.io

https://rebble.foundation/

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#58

Post by modeless »

radlad wrote: post #49
modeless wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They charged a subscription for those. If they lost money on that they have nobody to blame but themselves.

This thread is very confusing to me - they charged a subscription for these features. They weren't losing money - they were spending it. Money in, money out.

Their original statement was "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data" that was scraped from the Pebble app store. So, explicitly not on the other services. I have to agree with other commenters that $200,000+ seems like an extravagant bill for hosting this data for 8 years with a web frontend and maybe 20,000 users.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#59

Post by radlad »

modeless wrote: post #58
radlad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is very confusing to me - they charged a subscription for these features. They weren't losing money - they were spending it. Money in, money out.

Their original statement was "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data" that was scraped from the Pebble app store. So, explicitly not on the other services. I have to agree with other commenters that $200,000+ seems like an extravagant bill for hosting this data for 8 years with a web frontend and maybe 20,000 users.

I think this is a bit of a disingenuous reading of the article when the surrounding text states:

> Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around. [...] And the App Store that we’ve built together is much more than it was when Pebble stopped existing. 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!

All of these things take time and money.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#60

Post by modeless »

radlad wrote: post #59
modeless wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their original statement was "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data" that was scraped from the Pebble app store. So, explicitly not on the other services. I have to agree with other commenters that $200,000+ seems like an extravagant bill for hosting this data for 8 years with a web frontend and maybe 20,000 users.

I think this is a bit of a disingenuous reading of the article when the surrounding text states: > Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was a…

None of that is included in their statement that "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data". If they meant that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on building a dev portal, patching apps, and the other stuff you mention, they should have said that instead of "storing and hosting the data".
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