alt Hacker NewsI'm surprised by this comment; after the drama last week and after seeing this I fully have to side against Rebble.
The nature of driving a healthy open source centered ecosystem is that you don't control it under your iron fist: you make good contributions, users _and_ companies are able to use them in all new ways which comply with the licensing terms. And it seems that RePebble is going way beyond the licensing terms requirements, but bending over backwards to honor Rebble here when they aren't actually required to.
I just can't imagine what people want from RePebble if not this: they are being maximally open, making it so all of everything would be able to continue if they went out of business tomorrow, while also actively enabling people to continue using Rebble's store and paid offerings. Should they be forcing users to use Rebble's offerings (instead of making things even more open) as a reward for doing a good job bridging the dark age?
Replies
I agree, and Rebble themselves highlight how inflammatory their initial blog post was in their most recent one: https://rebble.io/2025/11/24/rebble-in-your-own-world.html .
They also backed down from their ludicrous position that they are acting as protectors of other people's watchfaces being downloaded in bulk by a particular company they don't like, whereas they are totally fine with the watchfaces being publicly available for general use. It clearly reads as them trying to clutch control of the one thing they haven't open sourced.
Rebble contributors did have a legitimate gripe, which is that they were lead to develop some additional software under the idea that there would be an agreement at the end of the day. But the Rebble Foundation's response to this was totally immature and irrational.
I agree with what Eric said in his follow up, which is that it is quite concerning to engage in a partnership with an organization which reacts like this as part of a negotiation process. God knows I wouldn't, and it doesn;t surprise me that an alternative solution was found.
My impression is that there is a lot more going on than just the facts provided by both sides. Core technologies managed to get Katie Berry to step away from the project[1] and that's extremely significant to me. Her tireless dedication to keeping Pebble alive (and get it open sourced) is how any of this is possible. For her to just up and leave now tells me that Eric and Core are not being as magnanimous and friendly to community as these blogs posts and actions might suggest.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1ozzsr9/an_update_o...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1p0huk5/pebble_rebb...