Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

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I am the primary author of the current generation Pebble Appstore frontend, the one that maintained the database most of the time, the guy who ran the security, infrastructure, data privacy team, and quite a few things around the Pebble ecosystem over the years. I also was on the team that begrudgingly had to hand it all over to Fitbit in the acquisition.

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.

FWIIW I have not yet talked to either side about this and we should wait to hear more from the other side before we raise our torches too high.

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.

Am I right in assuming that a large number of different people have contributed to this entire ecosystem throughout the years/decades?

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.

A commitment to making things available to all, means making them available to those seeking to make profit from your work without giving you any influence.

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.

Then surely you would not be opposed to Rebble using copy-left OSI compatible license, right?

OSI licenses for all of the things. Make it easy for anyone to stand up their own Rebble infra, data and all, or it is not really free.

If you had sudo permissions on the situation what 10 steps would you want to see happen to resolve this whole affair?

1. All: Put an FOSS license file in every single repo involved and make it public

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.

Lance -- I really like this comment because it is a compelling argument for something other than the viewpoint I hold. Obviously I am not fully convinced by it (yet?). But this is the kind of discussion that we had hoped for in response to this post. Thanks for posting it.

Update: Response from Eric.

https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-rebble-and-a-path-forward

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