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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Only a small part of the software in use here was written by Rebble. They cloned the Pebble app store originally, but the store has no value by itself. What makes it valuable is the catalog of watchfaces and apps, approximately none of which were built by Rebble. They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic. The software on the watch itself is mostly Pebble software with mostly Core Devices modifications. The phone app was written mostly by Core Devices. By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.

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?

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> They were originally scraped by Rebble from Pebble, which makes the accusation of scraping here ironic.

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

> 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...

It's like the maritime laws concerning salvage. Rebble rightfully salvaged a sunk ship. If the ship never sank then Rebble never would have taken possession of it.

> By Rebble's own admission using Rebble code only saved Core Devices "a month or two of engineering effort". And the "more restrictive license" they're accused of adding is AGPL, still aggressively open source.

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.

Rebble didn't write the firmware, just as they didn't write the apps and watchfaces that they scraped from Pebble for their store. Their main contributions were writing a web app to clone the Pebble store and maintaining it for many years, which we are all grateful for. But that doesn't give them ownership of the apps and watchfaces that give the store its value, nor the firmware that was open sourced by Google, which wouldn't have happened without Eric.

> nor the firmware that was open sourced by Google, which wouldn't have happened without Eric.

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.

Look, even Rebble's own blog post about the open sourcing says "a massive shout out to Eric Migicovsky for ensuring this happened". It is clear that he was the driving force that started the process inside Google that allowed it to suddenly happen after all these years.

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...

Would there even be a Pebble reboot if there wasn't a community around the watch and projects like Rebble?

> It was a failure of business management, not ethics.

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.

He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money. I doubt he personally made more than a token amount on the sale, liquidation preferences and all that. If selling out was his goal he could have sold out for a whole lot more money a year prior and chose not to.

> 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!"

> He had no way of continuing to support his customers without money.

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.

> Eric giving credit to Rebble

In which one of those quotes does Eric acknowledge how much his app owes to the work done by Rebble on libpebblecommon?

libpebblecommon consists of 5362 lines of Kotlin code. libpebble3 is 25578. Core Devices has done by far the large majority of the work even here, and Eric has heaped copious praise on Rebble repeatedly and consistently. If he didn't specifically write in a blog post that he's specifically thankful for this specific bit of code, that's a really weak criticism.

> libpebblecommon consists of 5362 lines of Kotlin code. libpebble3 is 25578. Core Devices has done by far the large majority of the work even here, and Eric has heaped copious praise on Rebble repeatedly and consistently. If he didn't specifically write in a blog post that he's specifically thankful for this specific bit of code, that's a really weak criticism.

I am sorry but I expect only pointy hair bosses to "measure impact" using lines of code. I expect better from our community.

The android app had stopped working for me a couple of months before the new Pebble came out, so my Old Pebble Time was at EOL, and unusable. The new Pebble app by Core devices made it work again.

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.

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