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 an hour ago | parent [-]

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 36 minutes 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.