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Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

ericmigi.com

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Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#91

Post by mazambazz »

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…

From the post on rebble.io

> We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.

So, another point of consideration is whether looking at names and pictures so you can personally favorite them constitutes as commercial use. Based on what Eric said, I don't really think so.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#92

Post by pavon »

margalabargala wrote: post #75
apparent wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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.

The 501c3 tax exception is specifically for charitable organizations, and the law and IRS interpretations exclude a number of groups that would colloquially fall under that description. On top of that there are many groups who aren't doing charitable work, but want to reinvest all revenue back into the organization and not be beholden to shareholders (private or public).

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#93

Post by radlad »

notaustinpowers wrote: post #85
radlad wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the main sticking point is this: ‘We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble’ Eric mentions that they want to release free weather APIs so apps that show weather don't need to require the user to add an API key. As well as voice-to-text transcriptions. Rebble offers both of those services as a paid subscription. That would hurt Rebble's bottom line. At the end of the da…

That's certainly the sticking point for Core. Also, Rebble is a non-profit, not a business.

> But also, they must have some big balls to claim that all of the data they scraped from the Pebble App Store is THEIR data. I'd like to see the agreements from the pre-Rebble devs attesting to that.

Agreed with this, but if it's not theirs, they also probably are not legally permitted to release it to Pebble (or host their app store, of course.) I am curious what the original terms were when they uploaded their apps to the OG Pebble app store.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#94

Post by micromacrofoot »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #10

I view this entire thing through an extremely simple, reductive lens: 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 the…

Yeah agreed, and I hope the Rebble people read this. They're being very protective and Eric is seemingly trying to include them when he could literally just shut them out.

They did good work in absence of anyone maintaining the product, but they're running software on a product they literally did nothing to build.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#95

Post by mikepurvis »

radlad wrote: post #81
modeless wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core doesn't want Rebble's data. They want the data from the original Pebble store, which is not owned by Rebble. It's the work of thousands of independent developers and it should be shared freely, not kept in a walled garden with "no scraping" terms added on. It's actually offensive that Rebble is using other developers' data (that they originally scraped from Pebble) as a bargaining chip in their contract negotiat…

I don't think that's quite right - Rebble has updated a number of these apps to keep them supported. As sibling commenter posted, the original apps are available publicly.

Updated themselves? Or accepted/hosted updates from third parties?

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#96

Post by Brian_K_White »

tomaskafka wrote: post #42
Defletter wrote: post #20

This is a bit of a what-if, but I had a Pebble watch back then and was considering trying to make an app for it. The idea that, if I had succeeded and published the app, that Rebble would be claiming ownership over my binary and threatening legal action against the original Pebble creator, to be really quite ridiculous and affronting.

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]

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#97

Post by Animats »

Pebble was a smart watch which was not tethered to a phone, talked to the cellular network directly, and had battery life problems, correct? Apple's smart watch was tethered to a phone, so it needed less power.

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.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#98

Post by gmarull »

Hi there, Gerard here. I work for Core as a firmware engineer, happy to answer questions as well.

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.

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#99

Post by pseudalopex »

stavros wrote: post #87
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…

Scraping has a very clear meaning here, that of exfiltrating data to store. If he just loaded some images to memory so he could pick favorites, that doesn't fit any definition of scraping I'm aware of.

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

Re: Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

#100

Post by Brian_K_White »

fphhotchips wrote: post #66
apparent wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

One thing I'm confused about in this whole thing is what makes Rebble think they have a right to the data in the first place? They scraped it! "We don't like you scraping the data we scraped" doesn't hold water for me, whether Eric retained it or not.

Pebble threw it away, Rebble did not, and Core is a newcomer whith no right to anything.
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