Pebble, Rebble, and a Path Forward
5 hours ago
- Eric Migicovsky states that Core Devices, Pebble community, and Rebble all want the same thing: Pebble watches to work long into the future.
- He disputes Rebble's claim that they '100%' own the Pebble Appstore data, arguing that the 13,000 apps were created by individual developers and should be freely available.
- He refutes four accusations from Rebble: (1) stealing open-source work, (2) taking libpebblecommon code, (3) breaking a promise about the developer site, and (4) scraping Rebble's app store.
- Eric explains that most of the libpebble3 library was written by Core Devices, and they purchased copyright to libpebblecommon code, all under open-source licenses.
- He clarifies that his personal webapp only displayed watchface names and screenshots for manual curation, not scraping apps from Rebble.
- The agreement between Core Devices and Rebble broke down over the archive of 13,000 apps; Eric advocates for a public, freely accessible archive on a neutral platform like Archive.org.
- He emphasizes that Core Devices has paid for open-source contributions (e.g., $10,000 to Codecoup for BLE fixes) and that all PebbleOS work is open source.
- Eric criticizes Rebble for creating a 'walled garden' and urges them to publish their app store archive, stating that the community should honor original developers.