Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#111

Post by cweagans » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #64

shreddit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

They aren't a 501c3. When I wrote my original comment I did a search for Rebble among all 501c3 ores and they are not there. I looked closer after your comment. They appear to be a "Michigan Domestic Non-Profit Corporation". Why aren't they a 501c3? I have no idea. It makes me trust them less to be honest, that they are some sort of nonprofit but not a 501c3.

I am neither an accountant nor a lawyer, but I have set up a 501c3 before.

I think you have a misunderstanding of how that works. In many cases, you need both the state and federal non-profit designation (i.e. a Michigan domestic non-profit corporation would not pay state income taxes on charitable income + that same corporation would need the 501c3 designation from the IRS to have the same benefit at the federal level).

Do you have positive confirmation that they are not filing as a 501c3?

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#112

Post by asadm » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

It seems Rebble has no moat here. The end devices are all controlled by Pebble which can point them to any store they want.

That must be making Rebble upset?

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#113

Post by wlesieutre » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:17 PM UTC

radlad wrote: post #16

renewiltord wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear why the community refuses to make the app store archive public. It's an archive of other developers' work. Doesn't make any sense to say "you can only get these from the Rebble website". Just do requester-pays on the S3 bucket.

The concern is that it will be imported into a separate 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. As I understand it, they almost came to an agreement on this: > We want to give Core’s users access to the Rebble App Store. (We thought we agreed on that last…

Not affiliated with Rebble, but IMO another worry is that Core Devices takes the store and turns around and says "the app/watchface store is for official Pebble hardware only via the official Pebble phone app." It's not only about Rebble being locked out, but any hypothetical future hardware from someone other than Core Devices.

Part of the excitement of the Pebble OS being open sourced is that someone else could cook up their own watch, either for a different physical style, weird niche features, a successor to Pebble Time Round that Core Devices so far hasn't shown interest in making, etc. Will that happen? Who knows. But I like that it could!

If Core Devices vacuums up the Rebble store, puts Rebble out of business, and says any 3rd party Pebble OS devices aren't allowed to download apps from the main source, that's not good for the open community. I have no idea if Core Devices intends to do that, but it would be nice if they agreed that the store will stay open for everyone with compatible devices.

Whether Rebble has any legal leverage to do that since the data they archived from the original Pebble store isn't legally theirs to begin with, I have no idea. But given that the store's contents only survived because of their efforts, it feels like the right thing to do.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#114

Post by jwise0 » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

amatecha wrote: post #33

Ignoring all else, did private conversation participants consent to their messages being posted publicly in this post?

As someone else posted a link to the Reddit thread, I posted there to say, roughly, 'no, I'm pretty unhappy about it'.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#115

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:20 PM UTC

apparent wrote: post #77

margalabargala wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some digging in a reply to a sibling comment. Basically, they are not a 501c3. They are a Michigan state specific nonprofit. My original comment was made after a 501c3 search turned up nothing. I don't know why they would decline to be a 501c3 and instead only be a Michigan nonprofit.

Huh that seems very odd. And it's strange (and possibly misleading) to say you are a "non-profit" under these circumstances. Any chance they recently changed status, and it's just not showing up yet?

Just FYI. 501(c)(3) is not the only federal nonprofit designation.

I have dealt with 501(c)(7) (basically a club), and I suspect there are others.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#116

Post by philipwhiuk » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #96

tomaskafka wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am one of the developers who did make Pebble apps - here's a screenshot with the Pebble version of Weathergraph on Eric's watch: https://x.com/weathergraph/status/1959253197664469246 Today is the day I found out Rebble is claiming the ownership of my app's binaries. All I can say is that they don't have it.

[flagged]

> Rebble does not claim to "own" your app, they only claim to have done a lot of work saving and patching abandoned apps and recreated a whole service for managing and distributing them, wrote new apps, published new apps along with the old, to support watch owners that Pebble abandoned.

Because they never had the right to redistribute it.

This is like YouTube shutting down and me offering a bunch of videos I download for free, claiming that setting up a portal was a lot of work so I get rights.

I’d get sued to high heaven and the only reason Rebble is getting away with it is that the watch face developers aren’t big outfits with lawyers.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#117

Post by palmotea » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:24 PM UTC

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…

>> 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.

That's an extremely uncharitable take. It's not like Rebble drove Pebble out of business. What I gather is basically Pebble fell apart on its own, and Rebble picked up the pieces to keep things working.

It seems what Core wants do here is take what Rebble build/maintained and drive Rebble into irrelevance.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#118

Post by philipwhiuk » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

asadm wrote: post #112

It seems Rebble has no moat here. The end devices are all controlled by Pebble which can point them to any store they want. That must be making Rebble upset?

Rebble’s moat is the content from pre 2018 that they are illegally redistributing.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#119

Post by philipwhiuk » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

radlad wrote: post #69

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the risk you run when you contribute work to open source. Unless there’s an accusation that Eric / Core is violating license, I don’t see a lot of merit to Rebble’s position.

I think you're 100% right WRT the open-source code Rebble developed publicly. The big open question right now seems to be about the private app store data Rebble archived (and further developed) - which looks legally murky to me.

But they don’t have any rights to that data. They don’t own redistribution rights for the apps.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#120

Post by jacobgkau » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 10:29 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #104

pseudalopex wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard someone say bulk downloading and data extraction wasn't scraping if it used volatile storage.

When have you seen someone scrape data for volatile storage?

It's irrelevant to the definition of "scraping." Scraping from a website is grabbing data, in bulk, not through the website's own interface. It doesn't matter if you save the data, use it in RAM, or just download directly into `/dev/null`. Just like scraping paint off of a wall is still "scraping" whether you're letting it fall onto the floor, collecting it into a trashcan, or sweeping it out the door afterwards.