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The subscription fee was what enabled them to host these services. From their blog post, they mention spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructur
by radlad 11mo ago
The subscription fee was what enabled them to host these services. From their blog post, they mention spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure and software. I expect that the connections and skills involved in running the Rebble web services don't directly translate to creating a hardware product.
That said, I think you are right that Rebble is feeling left out - and that it is hard to figure out exactly how they can fit into Core's vision. But I think there are a couple of primary and immediate issues:
1. Core wants Rebble's data - so clearly there is value here, but Core is framing this debacle like Rebble is irrelevant. Also, I don't know that Google would've ever released PebbleOS if Rebble didn't exist
2. Rebble wants to see the future of Pebble remain open-source or at least compatible with their services, so that if Pebble goes bust again, the community can continue on
- modeless 11mo agoCore doesn't want Rebble's data. They want the data from the original Pebble store, which is not owned by Rebble. It's the work of thousands of independent developers and it should be shared freely, not kept in a walled garden with "no scraping" terms added on. It's actually offensive that Rebble is using other developers' data (that they originally scraped from Pebble) as a bargaining chip in their contract negotiation that they made into a public squabble.
- nosrepa 11mo agoSo, this? https://github.com/aveao/PebbleArchive/tree/master/PebbleAppStore https://github.com/aveao/PebbleArchive/tree/master/PebbleApp...
- radlad 11mo agoI don't think that's quite right - Rebble has updated a number of these apps to keep them supported. As sibling commenter posted, the original apps are available publicly.
- mikepurvis 11mo agoUpdated themselves? Or accepted/hosted updates from third parties?
- Anonbrit 11mo agoUpdated themselves
- whyenot 11mo agoAre they still open source? If so, why does it matter who updated them?
- repeekad 11mo agoI think that’s the crux of the issue is rebble isn’t under any obligation distribute them open source, unless say the original app had a “copyleft” policy?
- micromacrofoot 11mo agoAFAIK the original apps were individually licensed by the creators... so Rebble would need to have permission before claiming anything for their own except in the case of explicit permissive licenses (like MIT). In some cases (copyleft licenses) Rebble would be required to make their maintenance also open source.
- xyzzy_plugh 11mo agoI'll be totally honest: I have no idea what they possibly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on. That seems totally absurd and reckless.
- kstrauser 11mo agoYeah. If they’d said “hundreds, or maybe thousands of dollars”, ok, sure. But that just cannot possibly be an inherently expensive service to host.
- joelhaasnoot 11mo agoThere is also weather and voice recognition services. If implemented with third party APIs those costs can add up.
- modeless 11mo agoThey charged a subscription for those. If they lost money on that they have nobody to blame but themselves.
- radlad 11mo agoThis thread is very confusing to me - they charged a subscription for these features. They weren't losing money - they were spending it. Money in, money out.
- modeless 11mo agoTheir original statement was "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data" that was scraped from the Pebble app store. So, explicitly not on the other services. I have to agree with other commenters that $200,000+ seems like an extravagant bill for hosting this data for 8 years with a web frontend and maybe 20,000 users.
- 11mo ago