Core Devices keeps stealing our work(rebble.io) |
Core Devices keeps stealing our work(rebble.io) |
Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969250
This behavior from Core may be par for the course, but I can already buy watches from companies that have values only for marketing. It's a small niche, and being nice would not cost much.
And they already died once, without having a proper off-ramp for their users - for now I don't trust them to exist in another two years. (I'm not really sure they even are in this for the long term - talk is cheap.)
The playbook isn't exactly a secret. What you might describe as a "classic walled garden enshittification trap", Peter Thiel and Sam Altman would describe as "monopoly (affectionate)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4 – "proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale", exactly by the book.
I think the bias towards optimism is commendable but I hope this is the wake-up call the community needs to treat "your love is valuable enough to build a business around" as the Faustian bargain it is and keep Core Devices on a short leash. They want to own you, not work with you. It's their nature.
My preorder is definitely on the line if this doesn't get fixed.
So far no response from Eric. If it won't be a good one, I'll cancel the preorder.
There was a lot of FUD against LGPL that was probably driven by the fact that businesses wanted to slurp up open-source libraries and bundle them into valuable bits of tech without having to contribute back or compensate the library authors.
Negotiation and compromise has its place but if someone negotiates by only taking you bail
Fairly certain the Rebble folk know the answer they'll get from their users.
I'm certain the EFF would probably be very interested in pursuing this.
Unrelated but this always reminds me of the Bushism "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... can't get fooled again!".
nobody needs a watch. don't be greedy.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
1) they knew they were insolvent, and wouldn’t be able to continue
or
2) the campaign was used to demonstrate market demand to enable their sale to Fitbit
Edit: also, they sold for $23 million [1], total pledges were for about $13 million, and not everyone got a refund [2]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fitbit-bought-pebble-for-23-...
[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
I have a very strong opinion here.
Any development of Pebble as an ecosystem that is not 100% free open source software and available to the public, is a dick move at this point. It is a dick move if Eric does it in any way, and it is a dick move if the Rebble team does it in any way.
Let Eric or anyone else scrape what they want with the Appstore and wish them luck. Maybe even make a nice JSON export button for people, why not?
Meanwhile those in the community should keep doing what they have always done: Work towards fully open source community first solutions with the full blessing and support of said community.
Proprietary solutions are always a dead end so do not waste any energy fighting them or thinking about them. Just keep pushing to public repos.
But regardless of whatever happens with Core Devices and Rebble: Personally, I just want choice and ownership. If Core Devices does not make it hard to compile and load my own firmware from FOSS sources, and so long as there is a short path to interface with new hardware over bluetooth/wifi/lora etc with a FOSS SDK or CLI tools, I am very likely to be a customer and ignore any drama.
The pursuit of more hackability and choice are why I backed Pebble in the first kickstarter, and the lack of total freedom and choice in daily-wear-ready devices in the current market are why I have exclusively used analog watches the past 5+ years.
I totally get why you wouldn't want your work to end up silo'd to a specific org if you had created it, intending it to be used by the general user, and not (via) a company.
Rebble was built on borrowed work of others combined with their own and should be willing to pay that forward for anyone else that wants to try out alternative visions for the Pebble ecosystem.
Open source solutions are unkillable so long as a community exists, unlike proprietary solutions. No proprietary solutions by Core Devices are a threat to Rebble.
They should negotiate a big donation for Rebble and shake hands.
2. Rebble: Make every database be easy to export as JSON or similar
3. All: Let everyone do what they want
4. Core Devices: Make it easy for devices to point at Core Devices or Rebble services and firmware updates as they like
Could not come up with 6 more steps.
Fighting those with (perceived or real) intention to profit from community work is a waste of energy that can be better spent serving that community.
Best to focus on making people want to run the open source alternatives over any proprietary first party solutions that may or may not emerge.
> We made it absolutely clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of the Rebble Web Services.
> We’d already agreed to give Core a license to our database to build a recommendation engine on. Then, Eric said that he instead demanded that we give them all of the data that we’ve curated, unrestricted, for him to do whatever he’d like with. We asked to have a conversation last week; he said that was busy and could meet the following week. Instead, the same day, our logs show that he went and scraped our servers.
Seriously uncool. I don't really consider myself a part of the Pebble community anymore (despite having two of the OG Pebble) but I'd def lean towards getting legal input on this...
There may be another side to this story, but it's so far not a good look for Pebble/Core, and this post is well reasoned and written enough that I doubt there are many places for alternate explanations to hide.
For those immediately jumping ship: have some patience and observe. You heard one side of the story that yes, someone was frustrated enough to drag all of this public, but that cannot possibly tell the whole story. Please stop escalating the problem by throwing it all away and instead seek to reach out and steer this around instead.
I do get the idea, he wants to build hardware and thus needs to be able to do whatever he wants to the code and not wait for merges but it sucks he seems to probably take it too far, for example not using the Rebble mobile app and instead making his own around the library, that's also closed source
Well, it's better to figure this out today (that Eric / Core are not so great) rather than a year or two down the line when I'd have already bought a new Pebble. Still sucks, I was excited. Never had one but I want something in the same niche.
Does anyone have suggestions for other good low-capability, long battery, hackable eink watches?
We've been looking for these for years, and never found them. Pebble coming back was the solution that we all dreamed about.
Gadgetbridge works pretty well with Amazfit smart watches, although they are OLED, not eink. Batteries last more than 1 week.
There's still a chance for a win here, but looks like the door is closing.
Indeed, it bodes rather poorly for the sustainability of Core if they're already behaving like owning everything is critical to satisfying some hypergrowth checkbox. I kind of thought the whole point of the new organization was not to be another startup and to rather to be more like a scaled cottage industry player, making a niche product for nerds and selling it directly to them for a reasonable upfront profit margin rather than depending on collecting rent from a closed app ecosystem to pay the bills.
> We’ll compromise on almost everything else, but our one red line is this: Whatever we agree on, there has to be a future for Rebble in there.
I can see through to the good intentions, but this mindset has a very dangerous sandbagging risk to the other party.
Could you imagine a company forcing you to exclusively use them and only them as a vendor for the foreseeable future? Not just for a single contract, but for many contracts beyond it? Or one especially long contract?
That’s just not fair.
There are some other red flags here too. I am not convinced they have the ability to license a database they themselves scraped, nor if there’s any obligation to merge the particular code changes if any back upstream.
A legal guarantee that they'll allow people to configure their watches for an alternate app store would probably be sufficient, for instance.
The ask there is for a future in app stores beyond Core Devices, not just for Rebble specifically. That is a call for Core to open their platform; what they have now is a call for Core to open their platform to them.
I'm also a bit sad that this is the first we're hearing of this tension, because it likely would've changed my decision to purchase a new Core 2 Duo watch, and I would've preferred this sort of falling out happen before a lot of devices have been purchased.
There needs to be a business making money to build the hardware to support this community. I appreciate that Rebble kept the flame alive, but I support Eric and Core Devices in building a business that makes enough money to fund new development of both hardware and software.
It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit and Pebble engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
Still keeping my preorder, but damn dude this kinda sucks.
- You can’t directly access the microphone audio
- They don’t sell replacement parts
A bad look for a “hacker watch” and apparently not a fluke. Oh, and they just dropped all of their users when they sold themselves to Fitbit.
Rebble have demonstrated great stewardship of the ecosystem, Eric has not. My trust is with Rebble.
That said: It was Core Devices who made my watch work again on iOS, the Rebble project for this never materialized.
A bummer in my opinion because they probably have the understanding of what makes a good smartwatch that most of the industry seems to lack.
I was really looking forward to my pre-ordered Time 2, as a Pebble Steel then Time Round owner.
But you cannot do this to Rebble. You just can't, this is unacceptable. Cancelling my preorder :(
I've built custom firmware for a DIY OLED ESP-32 watch that is made by a few vendors before. In some ways we're emerging into that reality now but I'd admit that what Core Devices is trying to do and the general level of polish of the Pebble ecosystem is a lot further than something like what I'm describing.
Edit: under what license did rebble scrape the app code? Couldn’t Core Devices scrape it from rebble under the same logic?
> We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around.
> 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!
it sounds like Rebble scraped the original store, built a new API and storage layer, facilitated the publishing of new apps, and kept old apps updated when external changes would've rendered them otherwise unusable. then tried to work with Eric to reach an agreement where both parties could have a piece of the pie in the relaunch.
Is that legal?
If things get sorted, I can order again
I think apache is fine for commercial use.
It seems to me the terms of the apache license weren't followed? In there it says to include the apache license file, not throw it away.
(I am not a lawyer)
AGPLv3 seems decent - if you run it on a server, the users of that server can get the software I think.
Rebble's work is, as far as I can tell, entirely open source. The contents of the database are not, but those contents are predominantly a curation of other people's work, most of which is open source, along with some stats.
I'm having a hard time buying into this argument that any theft is actually occurring. Rebble can keep on doing their thing if they want. Core is free to use their open source (and relicense! but obviously they can't retroactively relicense the prior work, nor can they change the license in Rebble's repos).
To be perfectly honest this reads to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
The fact that any of this even exists -- Rebble, Core, the firmware OSS, the Pebble name again -- feels miraculous. More litigious lawyers could have squashed these things at numerous points.
I feel sorry for the Rebble folks that they feel they're getting the short end of all of this. But that's the beauty of it all, of Open Source.
I do hope that Core and Rebble can find a way to be more harmonious moving forward. And I hope everything continues to be Open Source.
Let's hope Rebble doesn't get steamrollered. They did good work when the original company failed its users.
If you look at the link they have for proof, the change was GPLv3 to a dual-license AGPLv3 + not-really-specified license you can privately arrange.
They have to respect the original GPLv3 license, which means that Core has to continue to publish all libpebble3 changes under a GPLv3 compatible license, and they do appear to be doing so, even if they also offer a separate license for sale.
I feel like rebble is phrasing this a little misleadingly too. The neutral phrasing here would be "Pebble forked our work, and per our GPL license is continuing to make all their changes available to all users for free. If you contribute to their repo, not ours, they now require a CLA, and for code they write you can also pay them for a difference license (though it's always also available for free under the GPL)"
There may be something that's real here, but "forked our library and added a CLA" feels normal and expected, not worth hostile phrasing.
That being said, libpebblecommon seems to be Apache 2.0. But this part of the diff seems questionable:
> # Copyright and Licensing
Copyright 2025 Core Devices LLC
How does Core own the copyright to this code?
Literally linked in the article at exactly the words in the quote you're replying to.
They link to this as their proof: https://github.com/coredevices/libpebble3/commit/35853d45cd0...
Yes, this is an attempt to nerd-snipe you into giving a marginally more informed opinion, while also shame you for being too lazy to click a single link, but not too lazy to type an entire comment.
I wouldn’t want to deal with a random open source project while running a company either, but I wouldn’t try to pretend to either, I hope.
Also generally agpl 3.0 is considered a viral license, so accessing it over a network is considered a form of distribution (which is probably why they dont like it) but relicensing it is just a core "nope" type of thing.
(also dual licensing seems like you're relicensing effectively if the purchaser doesn't have to respect the gpl license, but not as clear to me)
Distributing a mix of AGPL and GPLv3 code is pretty reasonable to do, right, and I think basically all the user's rights under the GPLv3 are being fulfilled just fine.
I agree the commercial license could be dicey, but I assume in reality it's the usual AGPL thing where it's "If you pay, you don't have to comply with the network-services bit, but you now get the code under the GPLv3, so you have to make a network service and ensure your users _never_ get binaries containing this code".
Or, possibly even more realistically, they've put that there and if anyone says "We'll pay $3M for un-encumbered code" they'll rewrite the code from scratch to make it un-encumbered by the old GPL code, and until someone says a number big enough to cover the rewrite they'll never actually do anything.
> Copyright and Licensing
A forward-looking section applying to all new changes going forward I guess.
As long as they've preserved the old copyright notice somewhere, and it's given to users who request it, it doesn't really matter what the README says does it?
I promise I'm not a shill for them. I do think what they're doing comes off as overall not great, but not as "willful GPL violation" (they're still sharing code), and not as egregiously malicious as the blog makes it sound, so the blog author has me a little unsympathetic with their own misleading (in my opinion) phrasing of this stuff.
Not exactly the above case, but from the GNU GPL version 3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt):
13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single
combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this
License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work,
but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License,
section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the
combination as such.Scraping data because the original publisher is going under to prevent the data from being lost is very different from scraping data from someone who you are actively trying negotiate with over use of that data.
> It's also strange to me that the Bluetooth commit they point to before claiming "Rebble paid for the work" was actually written by Liam McLoughlin, a Google and former Fitbit engineer. Was Rebble paying a Google engineer?
The claim was that Rebble paid the developers of NimBLE, Codecoup, to assist with integration of NimBLE into RebbleOS
OK, that claim wasn't actually made in this post. I see in a blog post last month they say "We engaged the services of Codecoup – the maintainers of NimBLE – to help us find a handful of bugs in our implementation of Bluetooth on legacy watches". Core Devices isn't selling legacy watches though, and they've been working on Bluetooth since long before last month. So it's still not clear to me what Bluetooth work Rebble is claiming to have paid for that Core Devices is actually relying on.
Also, in that same post they say "we’ve made it work by agreeing that Core will pay us a reasonable amount to cover our costs and to support the maintenance of Rebble Web Services". So Core is actually supposed to be paying Rebble, they're not just using the store for free. No mention of that in this post...
The "a month or two" was specifically about the mobile app, not the firmware, dev portal or store data.
To me it seems pretty obvious that Core Devices has benefited and enourmous amount from Rebble's work. The fact that Core Devices seems uninterested in contributing back tells me all I need to know about their ethics.
Yet Eric didn't fork Google's codebase, they forked Rebble's codebase.
> Rebble didn't write the firmware, just as they didn't write the apps and watchfaces
They did work on both. You seem pretty dismissive and one sided here.
> which wouldn't have happened without Eric.
Source?
The official google announcement claims that the code was open sourced "to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016"... which combined with an explicit callout to Rebble later, is a pretty darn clear statement that the code was released because of Rebble, not because of Eric.
Edit: So on one side we gave a community organization that us the only reason such a strong community still exists that has spent longer taking care of the Pebble community that Pebble the company existed. On the otherside we have an individual who has already sold out the community once, who is trying to start another company by extracting the sweat equity of the organization that rescued his community from his choices. While doing this, he can't even be bothered to give credit to that organization for the massive opensource headstart they gave his mobile app or other efforts. Instead HE tries to take full credit for opensourcing his derivative work.
Edit: So while I agree that the Pebble community needs a for profit hardware partner, I no longer believe that parter can be Core Devices or led by Eric due to a lack of trust and ethics.
Rebble didn't do that. They were effective only keeping the old devices on life support. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome that Rebble came along and extended the life of our Pebbles. I'm siding slightly more with Eric and Co. than with Rebble.
Rebble did some work on the open source firmware in the four months between when Google opened it and Core Devices forked. It's a very small amount compared to the bulk of the whole firmware, which was originally developed by Eric's company, let's not forget. A few months of contributions don't give Rebble ownership of all that firmware code. It seems to me like Core Devices has contributed a whole lot more than Rebble did, especially for code that actually runs on their new devices rather than code for the old watches. And besides, Core Devices' firmware remains open source, and Rebble is supposed to be receiving payment from Core Devices for the use of the store[1]. There is no "stealing" here.
The narrative that Eric "sold out" the community is transparently ridiculous. His company failed. They ran out of money. It was a failure of business management, not ethics. And the narrative that "he can't even be bothered to give credit" is also transparently false. He credits Rebble all the time. In blog posts, on their website, on social media. And financially by paying them money to use their store.
[1] https://rebble.io/2025/10/09/rebbles-in-a-world-with-core.ht...
Yet he exited in a way that left his customers high and dry. You claim he made no money off of the sale?
> A few contributions don't give Rebble ownership of all that firmware code
I didn't say that it does. Eric chose to fork the codebase that includes those contributions so they clearly added value.
> He credits Rebble all the time.
>> Instead, we’ve built a new open source library called libpebble3. This library is ‘batteries included’ - designed to provide everything you need to build a Pebble companion app except for the UI. It’s a single cross platform (iOS, Android and desktop) codebase written in Kotlin Multi Platform (KMP). We’ve licensed libpebble3 under AGPL-3 with an optional commercial exemption for integration into a proprietary codebase. Learn about this strategy.
I see someone taking credit here, not giving it.
If Eric manages to find a way back on-side with Rebble, he may get abother chance. Otherwise he has already alienated a significant part of his target market.
> they clearly added value
A tiny amount compared to the whole, Core Devices' own contributions are larger, and the firmware remains open source! Nothing was stolen!
As for Eric giving credit to Rebble:
repebble.com: "This was also made possible by the Rebble team and community, who have supported Pebble since it shut down"
Eric's YouTube: "thanks to the clever work of Liam, one of my past Pebble colleagues and avid Rebble contributor, we switched to using an open source BLE stack called Nimble."
Eric's blog: "thanks to Rebble for keeping everyone engaged with a product that hasn’t been on sale since 2016!"
More on Eric's blog: "For the last 9 years, the Rebble Alliance has been keeping the Pebble dream alive. [...] I’m a huge fan" "Without the community or the OS, there is zero chance that these new watches would be possible! Thank you Rebble!"
Yet more on Eric's blog: "I’d like to thank [...] The Rebble Alliance - they’ve been keeping the Pebble torch lit in the intervening years, and (hopefully) continue nurturing and empowering the community years into the future."
Eric's social media: "Thank you, Google and Rebble! I can't stress how thankful I am to @pebble_dev (http://Rebble.io) and Google, in general and to a few Googlers specifically, for putting in tremendous effort over the last year to make this happen. You've helped keep the dream alive by making it possible for anyone to use, fork and improve PebbleOS. The Rebble team has also done a ton of work over the years to continue supporting Pebble software, appstore and community. Thank you!"
In which one of those quotes does Eric acknowledge how much his app owes to the work done by Rebble on libpebblecommon?
I am sorry but I expect only pointy hair bosses to "measure impact" using lines of code. I expect better from our community.
I don't see how you could possibly know this. Personally, I highly doubt that there was no other possible exit that didn't do a better job of taking care of his customers and supported the community. HE could have open sourced stuff, made sure the app store was backed up, etc.
> the firmware is still open source
Oh, I guess since one thing nobody is complaining about is true, then all their other comlaints are moot.
The value here isn't in the source code, certaibly not in the additions made by a 5 man company. The value is the community that has kept itself alive while maintaining and creating the resources that are giving Core Devices any chance of success.
Nothing was stolen, but a lot of good will was lost.
Edit: I see you've substantially edited your comment without any note yet again.