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Pebble Watch software is now open source

ericmigi.com

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Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#191

Post by RobotToaster »

paxcoder wrote: post #133
ddlsmurf wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the Pebble specific parts are. This is an unfortunate state of affairs from hardware manufacturers, they are very late to the open source game, if at all.

From the article: >Another important note - some binary blobs and other non-free software components are used today in PebbleOS and the Pebble mobile app (ex: the heart rate sensor on PT2 , Memfault library, and others). Optional non-free web services, like Wispr-flow API speech recognizer, are also used. These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them.…

> More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future.

That sounds ominous.

I can understand not being able to remove non-free dependencies that were used previously, but that sounds like they intend to create new non-free components.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#192

Post by aallaall »

bayindirh wrote: post #150
darkwater wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are not mandatory it's 100%. Otherwise according to your standard, Debian is not 100% free software either.

Debian doesn't advertise itself as 100% open source, either. Main and Contrib has to obey DFSG guidelines, and there's an optional non-free repository which you can enable if you prefer. Firmware is a gnarly can of worms though, and while I prefer 100% free firmware myself, companies are not brave enough to open that part of their ecosystem, yet, if ever.

Companies typically move more and more functionality to closed firmware, so they can ”open source” a thin wrapper, like a driver, that is often completely useless, and often encumbered with cryptography restrictions, strict trademarks and software patents anyway.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#193

Post by aallaall »

wafflemaker wrote: post #155
paxcoder wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: >Another important note - some binary blobs and other non-free software components are used today in PebbleOS and the Pebble mobile app (ex: the heart rate sensor on PT2 , Memfault library, and others). Optional non-free web services, like Wispr-flow API speech recognizer, are also used. These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them.…

IMHO, it's much closer to 100% than an iWatch or a Garmin.

1% is closer to 100%, than 0% is, yes.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#194

Post by bayindirh »

aallaall wrote: post #192
bayindirh wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian doesn't advertise itself as 100% open source, either. Main and Contrib has to obey DFSG guidelines, and there's an optional non-free repository which you can enable if you prefer. Firmware is a gnarly can of worms though, and while I prefer 100% free firmware myself, companies are not brave enough to open that part of their ecosystem, yet, if ever.

Companies typically move more and more functionality to closed firmware, so they can ”open source” a thin wrapper, like a driver, that is often completely useless, and often encumbered with cryptography restrictions, strict trademarks and software patents anyway.

This is not always true.

NVIDIA does exactly what you said. Move everything to firmware and closed GL libraries, and open source a kernel module to facilitate communication. They even created different firmware versions to prevent open source drivers to use the whole card.

AMD did the inverse: They re-implemented a fully open driver from scratch, opened up the specs, made every part which they can make (legally) accessible, accessible, open sourced ROCm and send in packages to major distributions' (main / open source) repositories. Their firmware is closed source, but it's obtainable and doesn't require signatures to enable the card. They even clashed with HDMI forums to make a libre implementation of v2.1, but the forum basically threatened them.

Intel's graphics drivers are basically the same with AMD.

Broadcom / Intel / Realtek NICs work without their respective firmware blobs, yet their offloading capabilities are disabled. Either way, the drivers are completely open source and in the kernel mainline.

Same for most sound cards sans Creative Labs. I want to hit them with a foam cluebat so bad.

Logitech's all stuff works with open drivers. They are the primary contributor to V4L standard, standardize their webcam interfaces and provide drivers or help.

Do you have any examples in mind?

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#195

Post by saagarjha »

user3939382 wrote: post #176
pjc50 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, this is one reason why there's not so much open source hardware out there: people get pedantic about it and apply gradually more unreasonable levels of requirement, rather than accepting partially or substantially open source solutions.

Read Reflections on Trusting Trust to understand why having little bits of binary blobs sprinkled all over your compute arch is actually a major problem. Just because it’s a hard problem doesn’t mean we’re gonna pretend it’s fine.

Reflections on Trusting Trust has never been a real problem, though.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#196

Post by RobotToaster »

aallaall wrote: post #187
RobotToaster wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every intel processor has a closed source IME, which is probably a NSA backdoor.

Isn’t minix open source?

Yes, the original is, but it's under a permissive license so Intel don't have to release the modified source code of their version.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#197

Post by esrauch »

wvenable wrote: post #115
infotainment wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those comments seem to just boil down to "Core probably could be more proactive about comms" , which hardly seems like a particularly egregious sin.

"interactions with Core have gone so poorly that they were adversely impacting my mental health" That seems a little more serious than "could be proactive about comms" especially when this is one of the key people responsible for a lot of the original Pebble tech, rebble tech, and working within Google to get the Pebble OS open sourced.

I think unfortunately this is a normal thing that happens: passionate people get very attached to something and have trouble dealing with dispute even when everyone is relatively good intentioned. I've seen it in the workplace a dozen times.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#198

Post by graemep »

squarefoot wrote: post #151
gf000 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above a certain complexity, there is basically no 100% open-source hardware out there. Like none of the Pinephone, Librem, Framework laptops are "open-source" to the bone.

Given how easy is to put and keep hidden malware into devices, governments should demand openness in that field as well. By "putting malware" I don't mean script kiddies in their moms basement but malware/spyware planted by design, which is extremely easy to do if you're the manufacturer, extremely easy to demand/force if you're the government above that manufacturer, and extremely hard to detect if you're a differen…

The thing is governments are the people doing it, and most governments want to be able to put backdoors in more badly than they want other governments to not put backdoors in.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#199

Post by leo_e »

As someone dealing with open-source compliance in distributed systems, the purity tests in these comments are exhausting.

Hardware is messy. IP licensing for sensors and radios is a nightmare. Getting a functional OS out with "only" a few binary blobs is a massive engineering and legal victory.

I'd rather have a working, 95% open ecosystem that I can actually hack on, than a 100% pure theoretical one that never ships. Kudos to Eric for navigating the legal minefield to make this happen.

Re: Pebble Watch software is now open source

#200

Post by leo_e »

zorgmonkey wrote: post #137
Larrikin wrote: post #118

A little surprised there has been no mention of the app being Kotlin multiplatform. https://github.com/coredevices/mobileapp I had heard of many smaller apps using Kotlin for their iOS app, but this may be the biggest all in multiplatform app I've seen. It would be awesome if there may eventually be support for writing Pebble apps in Kotlin.

Pebble watches run on Cortex-M microcontrollers which have less than 1MB of flash storage and RAM, I like Kotlin multiplatform but getting it to run on them is extremely unlikely. I assume that for the foreseeable future Pebble apps will be only written in languages which are traditionally used for MCUs like Rust and C\C++

It is honestly refreshing to see constraints like this again.

In my cloud infrastructure work (C++), we have gotten lazy. We bloat our containers because 'RAM is cheap'. Seeing a system designed to fit into 1MB reminds me that performance engineering used to be about efficiency, not just throwing more hardware at the problem.

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