Core devices keep stealing our work
This is a post that we take no pleasure in writing. When we wrote about our agreement with Core Devices last month, we came into it believing that the collaboration between Core and Rebel would be the best decision for the Pebble community. Core will lead the development of the brand new watches, and we’ll be there to provide our Rebel Web services alongside them.
Unfortunately, our agreement is already falling apart. We hoped that by putting on a kind face, and publishing an optimistic-sounding blog post with Eric, we would be able to collaborate in a way that meets our responsibilities to you, our users. We knew none of us would be able to achieve everything we wanted, but we thought we had enough common ground that we could serve Pebble users together.
Ribble has been working to keep the Pebble experience alive since the beginning – maintaining the App Store, building new services like Bobby, and running frontline support for people who keep their Pebbles active the whole time. (The Pebble App Store that offers the core Now! is supported by Rebel!) But Eric and Core have recently demanded that, instead of working together, we need to give them all our work from the last decade so they can do whatever they want with it. And in Eric’s latest newsletter, he won’t tell you the truth about where the work that runs his business comes from. We wanted to collaborate with them to create something great together, but we’ve reached an impasse. So now, we’re asking you – our community – to decide what to do with the core.
Nine years ago, Eric Migicovsky’s company, Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of business and discontinued support for hundreds of thousands of Pebble smartwatches. Rebels – and our community! – Made an extremely hard effort to save remaining data on the Pebble App Store.
Since then, we created a replacement App Store API that was compatible with the old App Store front end. We created a storage backend for this, and then we made huge efforts to import the saved data. We’ve created an entirely new development portal where you all submit brand new apps that never existed when Pebble existed. So far, we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting data. And the humans running Rebel servers have also spent incredibly late nights upgrading Kubernetes clusters, responding to outages, and generally keeping things organized.
What you now know as Eric’s new company, the Pebble App Store for Core Devices, is the result of nearly a decade of our work. The data behind the Pebble App Store is 100% authentic. And the App Store we’ve built together is bigger than it was when Pebble ceased to exist. We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and Weather endpoint updates. We have curbed removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we ran!
We have been talking with Eric for several months. We will compromise on almost everything, but our one red line is this:
Whatever we agree on, the future of Rebel will be in it,
We want to give core users access to the Rebel App Store. (We thought we agreed to this last month.) We’re happy to commit to maintaining web services. We’d be happy to have them contribute and create new features. And what we want in return is simple: if we grant Core access to our data, we want to be sure that they won’t simply build a walled garden app store around our hard work.
The problem is that the core won’t commit to it. The core is wanting unrestricted access to do whatever we want with the data we’ve stored and spent the last years curating, maintaining servers, and keeping relevant. If we gave Core the right to use App Store data as they wish, they could create their own Core-private app store, replace Rebel, and keep any new changes proprietary – the community would be left with nothing.
We’ve asked Eric about this every time we talk. He has sometimes said verbally that this is not his plan… but when it comes time to put it in writing, He has repeatedly refused to guarantee thisA week ago, we asked him to talk about this once more – he delayed our conversation, and Then in the meantime, they canceled our app store, in violation of the agreement we had previously made with them.
We are saddened that the Rebble community has been at odds with Core devices ever since Google released the original PebbleOS source code. We’ve been pretty quiet about this for a while – we thought we had a chance of working together if we tried hard not to fragment the community. But so far, a verbal promise is not enough.
When the code was released in January, we immediately branched the repository and started maintaining PebbleOS. To support classic Pebble devices, the Rebel community began porting an open-source Bluetooth stack to PebbleOS. Eric mentions this in his blog post, but what he doesn’t say is that Rebel paid for the work Which he took as the basis for his commercial watches!
Shortly after, Core forked PebbleOS Away from public maintenance. In June, they said they would merge from time to timeIt’s now November, and we still don’t see anything getting merged back. Many attempts to contribute to PebbleOS were blocked While we waited for the core to be merged upstream. It never happened. Eric, in his blog post, now says that he will run PebbleOS as a “benevolent dictatorship”.
Rebel’s work is the backbone of Core in other ways. Based on Core Devices app libpebble3In Eric’s blog post he said that the core created it. The reality is that life began with this libpebblecommonWhich was written by Rebels as part of our mobile app project (Cobble), and we funded through the Rebel Grants program. The work we did together saved Core a month or two of engineering effort initially; Core took Rebel’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by imposing a more restrictive license on their contribution and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.
A few months ago, Core promised that they would let Rebel maintain and own the developer site, after which Rebels spent several days rebuilding it, importing new content, etc. Then, in Eric’s original proposed agreement, he not only demanded that the core developers publish the site on their domain, but also that we Delete our copy of the developer site and redirect to their site,
These are certainly a blow to our community. We have tried not to let this affect our conversations: we want to work together. But we became cautious about this, knowing what the core promise meant.
The last straw was two weeks ago. We have already agreed to license our database to Core to build a recommendation engine. Then, Eric said that instead he demanded that we give him all the data we collected, unrestricted, so he could do whatever he wanted. We asked for talks last week; He said he was busy and could meet next week. instead, That same day, our logs show he went and destroyed our server,
Rebel’s goal is to create a community-driven space for the development of these watches we all love – today, and even in the future, if (love it!) something happens with Core Devices.
If we give Eric unrestricted license to our data, he can do the same thing he did with our firmware work and our mobile app work. He would have the right to take it over and create his own app store – and the work we’ve worked together as a community for the past decade would no longer be under our control.
We saw this ten years ago when Pebble went under (Rebelle has been around longer than Pebble and Core by far!). We don’t know if Core can commit to supporting this ecosystem in the long term. After all, the warranty on the Pebble 2 Duo is 30 days long, and early users are already reporting that their buttons are breaking!
But even if Eric’s intentions are still good and he can find the money to keep Core afloat, you can imagine that OpenAI, or someone else, will want to acquire Core and make him an offer he can’t refuse. We’ve seen this play out many times over the decade at many other companies – a product we love gets released, and then dies, becoming yet another victim of closed-source encroachment for profit. We love these watches, and we would be sad if this happened. And more importantly, we love this community of which we are the center.
We said in our previous post that Rebel is yours. This is what we mean. These are apps you’ve written and contributed to your fellow Pebblers. These are the watches you spent so long caring for and loving. This is your community, where you do amazing things. So we see two directions from here, and We need the community’s help to decide,
If you all want there is an option we can do that Aggressively defend the work we’ve doneAnd try to protect the community going forward. If Eric had the foresight to backup this data nine years ago and maintain it himself, there’s nothing we can say about it. But he didn’t do that and we did it together. We made it very clear to Eric that scraping for commercial purposes was not an authorized use of Rebel Web services.
It gets bad in a hurry, but we have legal resources that can protect us. We’d rather spend our time building the next generation of open source mobile apps than fighting a fight, but if that’s what we have to do, we’re not afraid. If we want to preserve what we have created, we must use our energy to protect it.
The other option is that we can Just let Eric do what he wantsEric believes that our database should be free for anyone to make their own copy, as we are a non-profit foundation, We don’t agree, but maybe you do! Nothing should last forever, and we’ve done a great job together, If the community prefers that we pursue this responsibility, we will do what you all feel is right,
Both of these are painful choices for us. And to be clear, we wouldn’t want to do anything! If Eric and Core are willing to give us a legal commitment that they won’t just kick us out, and that they will work with us, we would love to do that.We’re happy to allow them to create whatever they want as long as it doesn’t cause any harm to Rebel, Eric, you are the best in the world at creating unique hardware for people who truly love what they wear, We are great at building a community, Use our Locker, use our Timeline, use our App Store – we made it all just for you, As long as we can work together as partners,
But in the meantime, we’re at a crossroads here.
To our friends who have supported us over the years: We’re sorry you’re caught in the middle of this. We believe that Rebel can be the hub of the community, and the core can create amazing products, and there need not be conflict. Eric’s new devices, the Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2, look absolutely amazing! We want to support him in creating beautiful hardware long into the future – without trapping our users in the classic walled garden trap.
But we want your input. If Eric and Cor can’t play well, We need you, our community, to tell us what to doWe’re serious: if you think we should do something different, we will, So we’re posting it on Reddit /r/pebble and a few other places, We (gulp!) will read the comments – Top Rated And Long Tail – Trying to understand what the sense of community is. We may be watching a discussion on discord. And, of course, if you prefer, you can email the Rebel Foundation Board of Directors directly. We would like to hear from you.
Looking forward to seeing you – many of us from the Rebel team over the past 9 years, including: David, Joshua, Will, Ruby, Stacia (LCP), Cyan (Estosia), Harrison (Link Sky), Lavender, Ben, Efraim (GibbyMonster), Jacob (Jackie).