| This is a pretty predictable response. The problem is, this is a classic "he said, she said" situation. So it's pretty tough to tell whom you should believe, unless you are close enough to the situation to see it first-hand. Clearly someone is not playing nice, but it's not clear which party that is. Sucks for the user community though, either way. |
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| ▲ | johnmaguire 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It'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. | | |
| ▲ | johnmaguire 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The 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. | | |
| ▲ | wlesieutre 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not affiliated with Rebble, but IMO another worry is that Core Devices takes the store and turns around and says "the app/watchface store is for official Pebble hardware only via the official Pebble phone app." It's not only about Rebble being locked out, but any hypothetical future hardware from someone other than Core Devices. Part of the excitement of the Pebble OS being open sourced is that someone else could cook up their own watch, either for a different physical style, weird niche features, a successor to Pebble Time Round that Core Devices so far hasn't shown interest in making, etc. Will that happen? Who knows. But I like that it could! If Core Devices vacuums up the Rebble store, puts Rebble out of business, and says any 3rd party Pebble OS devices aren't allowed to download apps from the main source, that's not good for the open community. I have no idea if Core Devices intends to do that, but it would be nice if they agreed that the store will stay open for everyone with compatible devices. Whether Rebble has any legal leverage to do that since the data they archived from the original Pebble store isn't legally theirs to begin with, I have no idea. But given that the store's contents only survived because of their efforts, it feels like the right thing to do. | |
| ▲ | jjfoooo4 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’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. | | |
| ▲ | johnmaguire 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I 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 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I 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. | | |
| ▲ | johnmaguire 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's certainly the sticking point for Core. Also, Rebble is a non-profit, not a business. > 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. Agreed with this, but if it's not theirs, they also probably are not legally permitted to release it to Pebble (or host their app store, of course.) I am curious what the original terms were when they uploaded their apps to the OG Pebble app store. |
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| ▲ | philipwhiuk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But they don’t have any rights to that data. They don’t own redistribution rights for the apps. |
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| ▲ | Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So then what Rebble should be asking for is a (written, legal) promise that Core’s app store will also be public. This feels like it shouldn’t be difficult to hash out. | |
| ▲ | renewiltord 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Makes sense. They don't want to be EEE'd. Well, unfortunate, but this seems like a trust breakdown. |
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