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Eric has been a pretty stand-up guy when it comes to Pebble. He could have been content with an exit (though sad to see it wither in the hands of Fitbit => Goog
by tyre 11mo ago
Eric has been a pretty stand-up guy when it comes to Pebble. He could have been content with an exit (though sad to see it wither in the hands of Fitbit => Google), but instead kept the dream alive. He bought it back and made another refreshed attempt, despite being a YC partner and repeat founder.
It’s clear he cares deeply about this product and its potential, far and above what the community could hope for. I think the default trust should be with him, or at least it is for me.
- radlad 11mo ago> It’s clear he cares deeply about this product and its potential, far and above what the community could hope for. I think the default trust should be with him, or at least it is for me. The default trust should be with him instead of _the community_ that built and maintained Rebble for a decade?
- renewiltord 11mo agoIt's not clear why the community refuses to make the app store archive public. It's an archive of other developers' work. Doesn't make any sense to say "you can only get these from the Rebble website". Just do requester-pays on the S3 bucket.
- radlad 11mo agoThe concern is that it will be imported into a separate app store owned by Pebble, which Pebble will lock Rebble out of (i.e. block scraping and refuse to release this data), and then if Pebble goes bust again, Rebble is left with less than they started with. As I understand it, they almost came to an agreement on this: > We want to give Core’s users access to the Rebble App Store. (We thought we agreed on that last month.) We’re happy to commit to maintaining the Web Services. We’d be happy to let them contribute and build new features. And what we want in return is simple: if we give Core access to our data, we want to make sure they’re not just going to build a walled garden app store around our hard work. To be clear, the Rebble app store includes more than just things uploaded to Pebble - many apps have been created and uploaded since Pebble OG shutdown.
- renewiltord 11mo agoMakes sense. They don't want to be EEE'd. Well, unfortunate, but this seems like a trust breakdown.
- jjfoooo4 11mo agoThat’s the risk you run when you contribute work to open source. Unless there’s an accusation that Eric / Core is violating license, I don’t see a lot of merit to Rebble’s position.
- radlad 11mo agoI think you're 100% right WRT the open-source code Rebble developed publicly. The big open question right now seems to be about the private app store data Rebble archived (and further developed) - which looks legally murky to me.
- notaustinpowers 11mo agoI think the main sticking point is this: ‘We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble’ Eric mentions that they want to release free weather APIs so apps that show weather don't need to require the user to add an API key. As well as voice-to-text transcriptions. Rebble offers both of those services as a paid subscription. That would hurt Rebble's bottom line. At the end of the day, Rebble built a business on top of scraped Pebble App Store data & open source code. They continued to keep their code open source. Eric paid fees to gain the rights to any code that wasn't open source. The Pebble App Store data was never theirs. The underlying Pebble code was never theirs. The common library isn't theirs, Eric bought it from the maintainers. It really does suck that the Rebble developers could lose a decent source of income. But that's what happens when you build your business on open source technology that you don't own. But also, they must have some big balls to claim that all of the data they scraped from the Pebble App Store is THEIR data. I'd like to see the agreements from the pre-Rebble devs attesting to that.
- 11mo ago