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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment on Google’s Business reasons for doing this? Is this actually an act of goodwill or is this a commodity, antitrust, etc. play?

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Given the original Pebble folks are using this to spin up a re-launch ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845185 ), my guess is the Pebble folks just know someone on the inside at Google who managed to get the lawyers to sign off on it.

From my experience in large (and small) companies, trying to get something that is internally dead open sourced is usually not a huge fight against people saying no, just a laundry-list of things that need to be done before everyone will sign off on it.

One motivated person at a decently high enough level can get it pushed through, as long as whoever the person making the decision asks about it says, 'eh, ok.'

> Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post).

https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back

Ha! Called it.

google isn't doing anything with it, its not really a competitor to androidwear, and it probably has enough pebble nerd fans within google itself to push for it.

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