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Comment by jpalawaga | Hacker News Reader

through all of this, it really feels like rebble didn't know what they want (as they say). the future collaboration with eric also sounds like they don't know what they want. they want a third party mediator for... something. Eric was already prepared to pay them per user, which seemed generous to me to begin with.

It sounds to me like Rebble (the board + community) should figure out what they want before trying to proceed, lest they further waste time and good-faith negotiating capital. like are they unhappy with the previous payment rate per user? or something else?

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To me it speaks to the fact that Rebble is not really an organization that is in a position to actually negotiate a long term deal with another company and go through all the trials and tribulations that involves.

That is not a criticism of them nor is it surprising, their responsibility up to now has been to maintain a core set of open source software. A loosely structured control structure is entirely appropriate for that task. But it really does not work when instead of bringing one person representing the company to a negotiation, you have half a dozen people who all have their own thoughts and levels of interest and commitment, some of whom will resort to community action if they don't like something about the process.

It seems like Rebble (the board) really overplayed their hand.

From what they posted, it seems like they wanted more control over what Core was doing, deciding that the best way to do that was to try and hold the app store data hostage.

Now, with the Core app open sourced and multiple app store repos supported, Rebble's position will likely be greatly diminished from what it could have been if they had been satisfied with what they had. I guess in the end though, the outcome was a net win for everyone (fully open source apps), so it works out.

I spent some time on their Discord chatting and trying to nudge them towards a healthier approach.

Many of them seem to think that PebbleOS was released just for them (they quote the Google press release), and so reading between the lines I really do think they feel at some level that code has been "stolen" from them. Which is ridiculous (and I said so) but if they think it's true then it explains their actions much more clearly than any other explanation I've found (or they've elucidated).

My best understanding (which I've extrapolated from what I've learned) is that they had all these plans of being a scrappy team who worked together on PebbleOS in their spare time, as friends, and Eric capitalising a company of paid developers has made all those plans redundant - so they've been powering through the five stages of grief in coming to terms with that while everyone else has been celebrating the return of Pebble.

> they've been powering through the five stages of grief in coming to terms with that

If only! They trashed their reputation by lashing out at their own misapprehensions.

Having also lurked in their Discord, I think your analysis is pretty much spot-on!

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