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Comment by infotainment | Hacker News Reader

Agreed -- While I admire their work in keeping the lights on, Rebble doesn't necessarily make sense in a world where the "real" Pebble company has returned.

Keep in mind that this is their goal statement (straight from their FAQ):

> Our goal is to maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp.

Eric's new company, by effectively re-creating Pebble Technology Corp, is an existential threat to that mission: If there is someone else maintaining and advancing Pebble functionality, then what is the purpose of Rebble? It does seem unfortunate though -- I hope they can all work something out.

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Alternatively, I could say that Eric Migicovsky's track record is building a for-profit company that ultimately failed, and with the new company, he obviously, explicitly intends to prioritize selling new hardware. Whereas Rebble kept the lights on for devices that would otherwise have been bricks, as a collective of volunteer hackers.

Their missions conflict because Pebble2's potential customers largely overlap with Rebble's current users, but I would say their aims are quite different.

You could also say his track record is making things as open as possible so things like Rebble can spring up if necessary, but also in negotating deals that keep core services running for years after the purchase, and then after the purchaser's purchase.

I largely agree, but I think there's merit to Rebble's argument that Core Devices could be here today, gone tomorrow. I'd hate to see Pebble die again only for Rebble to have disbanded in the meanwhile. Then the community has nothing but code repos.

the OS is open sourced, so it's much less attached to Core Devices than the first go around

Could pebble2 launch with a minimal set of apps, asking the old Devs to push their binaries again? Sure, and with that in mind, all this deal with rebble does is save everyone time.

The way this reads, is a group of enthusiasts got together to create a lifeboat for people who wanted to keep their pebble devices alive... But are now building a moat around said life raft.

If they truly cared about the devices, the users, and the developers.. they would just drop this attitude and move forward.

Another interpretation is that for rebble the worst thing that could happen, was Eric coming back and restarting pebble.

Maybe they need a secret ‘Second Rebble’, hidden within Pebble, to take over if it collapses again.

It's open source now, so that's already taken care of.

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