Neat, I'm super excited! I've hoped the PineTime would be the new Pebble, but hasn't really materialized (though, it has gotten pretty good! despite being a little awkward).
I actually held off from buying a Pebble back in the day because the software wasn't open source and I was worried about getting dependent on a product I had no control over. (Yes, I see the vicious Tragedy of the Commons wrapped up there, but still gotta make the optimal choice for me). I'm beyond stoked to see this movement! And it being open source, I have no such qualms. If they are affordable enough, I'll probably be gifting these out on the regular so expect to sell at least a dozen or two :-D
I backed a Pebble Time Round Gold on the last Kickstarter, which was cancelled when Pebble was acquired. Somehow the devices ended up on Amazon, and I snagged one there. It's a phenomenally stylish device.
My white 20mm one with a brown leather band started more conversations than anything else I’ve ever owned and used, which was surprising but neat :)
Unfortunately mine got stolen and broken, which is a shame. I wonder how hard they are to buy today, and how difficult battery replacements for them are…
Battery replacement is difficult, not impossible, but bordering on impossible is restoring the waterproof seal. Once you've replaced the battery you basically have to keep it away from water. I wasn't careful with mine and lost two to water damage after replacing the battery, despite re-sealing with permanent adhesive.
Good to know! IIRC the Round didn't have as high a water resistance rating to begin with, and I typically wear a leather band, so this might not be a deal-breaker for me.
The PTRs weren't diving watches for sure, but the original waterproofing was easily good enough to withstand submersion, as long as the battery hadn't started swelling yet.
Pebble watches used a Sharp transflective LCD MiP Memory in Pixel display, meaning that the back surface of the LCD was slightly reflective for daylight reading, with front lighting for night.
Memory in pixel means that each pixel remembers its current state, saving on a lot of power budget because the bus/LCD controller is completely shut down, it essentially only uses power to update the display. Versus a traditional LCD or oled where you need to send it data at x refresh rate continously, meaning the high power draw bus and controller are constantly slurping power.
Even though eink has gotten better I still wouldn't use it for something like this, the refresh rate is still a tad too slow, the controllers are always proprietary weirdness with crazy voltage waveform magic to clear the display properly, resulting in that ugly multiple flashing that most eink/epaper displays do.
Quite, but a transflective one (from Sharp, I believe) which gave it a lot of the benefits of daylight readability while being much much easier to program for and work with.
With the benefit of a much improved battery life compared to a lot of other smart-watches. A worthy trade off, IMHO. And it its a lot less washed out than current colour (real) e-ink displays
forgot the name of the watch but it had an lcd display to save battery and a full touchscreen around 2017? i ended up using the lcd display mostly for HB and walk distance. it would be great if we had a completely e-ink based pebble watch with backlighting (lcd display was great but couldn't be viewed in the dark :/)
Hmm, maybe we can come at this from the other angle. We can't have small phones because bigger is always better, right? So how about a HUGE 5" screen smartwatch that just happens to be a perfectly functional standalone phone if you discard the wristband?? Instant best seller!
A better use of flexible screens than folding devices. Fitting under the cuffs of men's shirts is a constraint. I dictate most text entered on my phone, so a squishy typing surface wouldn't be so bad. Camera position could be tricky.
Problem is different people want different things. I for one want at least all day battery while using only about 60% of the capacity so realistically two full days battery from a single charge. I then want to be able to set a max charge limit of 80% beyond which the phone won't charge and have the phone die at 20%. Ideally, I also want the phone to be able to work off the wall meaning if the phone is plugged in to the wall, it should use power from the wall and not constantly charge and discharge the battery.
Serious question, when was the last time you degraded the battery of a phone enough to warrant replacement?
I got a Xperia XZ2 compact in 2018, and used it daily util a month ago. It made it through a day of regular use until the very end, when I had to retire it because of issues with software updates.
Modern-ish Li-Ion batteries can take thousands of full cycles.
I have some seriously bad luck with spicy pillows. I had a nexus 4 and 5 that had their battery swollen. Also an iPhone 6 and a Poco X3 pro. Also, a ZTE z959 and moto E4. I don't want a spicy pillow. I'd rather the phone turn itself off before the battery swells up but ideally it should automatically disconnect the battery and keep running off of the wall unless it is too hot, in which case, it should shut itself off.
Oh this is awesome. Are you involved with repebble directly?
I still have my time round in a drawer somewhere. I moved to a galaxy watch, which is great for being able to play Spotify offline, GPS etc, but like all modern smart watches is terrible for bloat and a screen that's responsible for like 70% of the power draw.
It's really disheartening that the average consumer only sees the shiny oled and slick animations and doesn't think at all about the inconvenience of charging at least once a day...
Which Pebble are you bringing back? I ask because Pebble 2 was the sweet spot for me with a heart rate monitor but the heart rate monitor is not in this repo.
The HRM aspect is mostly a small binary blob that ought to be fairly straightforward to re-integrate. The far larger issue is the lack of a Bluetooth stack.
This is really unfortunate for the existing users, especially given their profound loyalty. However, more modern chips have all of this loaded in a bootloader of sorts (e.g. nRF softdevices), so the project could prevent the RF driver nonsense going forward.
May I ask why it was so special for you? As I did not participate in all the hype and now I'm a happy owner of a Garmin watch and it does seem like it is closer in specs to Pebble than most other smartwatches. Other than the openness.
I wear a Garmin and I still miss my Pebble Time that died to swelling battery.
- Always on. Garmin has option to do that as well but it reduce the battery life to like 3 days. In outdoor my Pebble Time is very bright with zero backlight.
- 5 days battery. I went on a trip to Japan without its proprietary charger, by the time I board my flight back it was on power save mode and it died the moment the plane landed. Garmin could do this if you set it to power saving mode, but the Pebble is in standard mode. One could argue that the Garmin do have more stuff like health monitoring that Pebble didn't.
- Cheap and no frills. I want a second screen for my phone, not a health tracker. Originally my Pebble Time shipped with zero fitness features, and it later added a step counter once it's clear that the market direction go that way.
- Garmin is quite thick, Pebble Time is thinner
- The UI is simple - press up for past event, down for future event (calendar). Press the middle button for menu. Hold are configurable. Garmin has 4 main menus which are very confusing (fitness menu, shortcut menu, apps menu, system menu).
- Lots of free apps and watch faces which I actually used (like a music app that show album art). I don't see any apps I would want to use on the Garmin, and they're mostly paid. The "hide in a hole while ceiling crush the map" game on Pebble was really well done. Now my Garmin use the simple time in Verdana watch face because I cba to find a decent one.
- Even with low framerates, Pebble managed to deliver cute little animations. Replying to message show a flying paper plane, screen transitions have suitable animations (not generic ones like Android), and the best one is muting an apps show a Ostrich putting its head under the ground. The animation also hides how slow the hardware actually is, with later OS versions stalling over a second or two after a second long animation.
- I think the phone app UI is not as good as say, Apple Watch, but it focus on apps and the store without the fitness features. Garmin's app is entirely about fitness and they hide smartwatch stuff in a menu plus another separate Connect IQ app.
Overall the PebbleOS feel like a really solid and polished product than any smartwatch today. It do fewer things than most smartwatches, but that's all I care about and everything it does is very polished.
It was cheap, simple, did everything I wanted from a smart watch, and wasn't annoying to use (never had to worry about the battery). It wasn't a matter of a killer feature, more just the lack of the problems I see with all the alternatives since. Every time I've looked at a replacement option, I've noticed something that just made me not bother getting it.
There is apparently huge amounts of goodwill for Pebble!
But. Isn’t most of the value of a codebase like this not the code itself, but all the knowledge of the people who worked on it day to day? Where are they?
It’s really intriguing. People who have a lot of goodwill towards Pebble BELIEVE the source code is valuable. That doesn’t mean that it is.
Oh this is awesome news. The Pebble was by far the best smartwatch I've ever used. No quirks, just always reliable. The hard work shone through with how quirk free it was.
I had the OG pebble, which I only stopped using due to suffering the screen corruption bug that plagued a small percentage of the original models. Other than that it was smooth as silk. It'd last close on a month on a single charge. I literally charged it up before going on a 2 1/2 week vacation, didn't take my charger with me, and had no problems.
Then had an Asus ZenWatch 3. WatchOS was frustrating at the time over the ability to customise what notifications would actually get to the watch, and the battery life of the device was terrible, getting worse over the space of a couple of years. Even had some reliability issues with the messages actually reaching the watch at all.
Wanting to go back to e-ink displays and longer battery life, I've got a Amazfit Blip, who's software was just awful. Even "simple" things like sleep tracking wouldn't work properly, dying out or flat out not being accessible from "Sleep for Android", heart rate monitoring wouldn't sync reliably to anything, notifications would just randomly stop working. It also had no ability to disable certain apps from sending notifications to the watch, even if the notifications are set to silent on the phone.
There was an open source app that I used to have to use alongside their own app that was necessary to actually fix everything wrong with the original software and make the device work with anything approaching reliability.
The recent overhaul of their own app (seems like a ground up rewrite to me) has actually fixed most of the issues that I've had with it. It still occasionally just craps out and requires me to turn the whole bluetooth stack off and on again.
It was dead long before Google was involved. Pebble filed for insolvency back in 2016 with Fitbit acquiring much of the assets. It was dead at this point. 5 years later Google bought Fitbit.
Google didn't "vacuum up" Pebble. Fitbit bought them (after they were in financial trouble), Google bought Fitbit later so ended up owning the Pebble source code after that.
As the top voted comment on the article says, Google didn't have to do this. It's probably driven by only a few people internally there, and if everyone's cynical and nasty about it, they're less likely to try doing the nice thing again next time. That isn't a good outcome.
Pebble went bankrupt because no one bought their products. Their assets were acquired by Fitbit. Fitbit did not continue to produce the Pebble products for which there was very limited demand. Google then later acquired Fitbit.
Big Tech companies acquired and acqu-hired many unsustainable small and medium sized businesses in the past 16 years. Most people don't know that because seller doesn't want to admit they were a bad unsustainable business and buyer doesn't want to admit they are buying a bad unsustainable business.
They sold 2 million units, which is nothing to sneeze at for a Kickstarter-funded project. What they miscalculated was the demand for the Pebble Time, for which they spent too much money on R&D and marketing to justify the results. They should have iterated on the original design, making it cheaper, smaller, and longer-lasting. Instead they tried to go upmarket and compete with the Apple Watch, with predictable results.
They didn't have to do this. They didn't even acquire Pebble outright, they acquired it through Fitbit, and Pebble was just a part of Fitbit's portfolio from a previous acquisition.
>We should be more upset that projects get acquired, shut down, and never see the light of day again because these massive companies must continue to expand at all costs.
>Stop treating mega corporations like they've done you a favor when they've done the bare minimum.
Most of the projects that got acquired and acqu-hired by mega-corporations were bad unsustainable businesses.
Fortunately you don't need to go on your feelings, because people involved have told us exactly what happened. RePebble guy (Eric) reached out, asked them to open source, they spent a ton of effort to get it releasable, and did just that.
Old versions of CMSIS had a weird "only for use with ARM hardware" license header, which also carried through into most BSPs. I don't think this was resolved until around CMSIS 4, so it might just be a matter of front porting since it looks like normal STM32 stuff which is mostly permissively licensed now.
Yeah. And ngl porting up to newer versions of CMSIS isn't too terribly hard. I'm looking at porting up to CMSIS 6 soon and it doesn't look like it'll be that bad either.
Presumably the source included the TTF files from which the rasterized bitmap resources were automatically generated. Including the pre-rasterized bitmaps extracted from a previous release should not be a problem as typefaces and bitmap fonts are not subject to copyright in the US, vs vector font files which are eligible for copyright as computer programs.
The Bluetooth stack, except for a stub that will function in an emulator
This seems unfortunate, and looks to be one of the most critical gaps in the source release.
The STM peripheral library
You can get this from ST no problem, although it is only licensed for use on STM devices.
The voice codec
It should be feasible enough to replace this.
ARM CMSIS
The old versions with non-free licenses are still available from ARM or ST, and the recent versions are Apache licensed (but some porting of code might be required to use to newer versions).
For the Pebble 2 HR, the heart rate monitor driver
This was probably based on sample code from the vendor which could be replaced.
I remember reading that the Bluetooth stack was one of the main differentiators for Pebble at the time due to its reliability, shame it's not included here.
In 2014, that certainly was true. Every open source Bluetooth stack (i.e., Android, Linux and FreeBSD) was buggy and unreliable. Since then they rewrote the Bluetooth stack in Android twice, and finally what's in AOSP is quite comprehensive and reliable. It's now been merged into ChromeOS as well.
I feel like it's the same about many of the items mentioned above, the free/libre offering in that space are a lot more polished than was the case 9-10 years ago. Back then the audio codec was still a patent encumbered minefield, now you can just use opus. The quality and diversity of free fonts is ordered of magnitudes above what it was 10 years ago.
In short, it should be much easier for Eric to fill those gaps with free/open offerings than it was 10 years ago.
This, Google Wave, Tilt Brush (and more recently Blocks). And probably others I've forgotten.
This really does help mitigate the damage done by "Killed by Google" and people are genuinely grateful (personally in my case).
But even better would be to fix the dysfunctional internal dynamics that cause this syndrome in what appears to be disproportionally more frequently compared to other corporations.
That's what happens when you don't have to play by the rules of reality. Googles monopoly allows them to act like this. It's unfair and generally bad for everyone involved. Thankfully it seems that that era is finally going to end
> It's unfair and generally bad for everyone involved.
The solution is simple - don't hop on Google's new products (there's a risk with the older ones as well, albeit smaller). It's just not worth it to invest your money and time with such a significant risk of it getting killed (and its general half-assedness). There are usually alternatives.
Sorry, what? Depreciating a product has never been illegal in America. Consumer protections are an afterthought, and that applies to Google as much as it applies to Apple and Microsoft. You aren't owed shit.
The rules of reality are written the moment you click "agree" on the EULA. Like the other comment says; the only way to win is to refuse buying things you don't own. Otherwise you're just a sucker who has a hard time living down their mistakes.
Eh, I take a much more "gloves off" approach to this mentality. If you bought an Airport thinking that it would be your forever router, you're a moron. Same goes for buying an eero, or Google Home, or even an iPad at this point. You don't own this hardware, you control nothing about it. The idea that products live forever is a bedtime story we tell ourselves, an utter fairytale of the software industry.
Everyone kills software products. The problem is our attitude of entitlement towards things we sign an EULA to use. You "own" TikTok on the App Store? Pssh, please. You don't even own the software runtime you use TikTok with.
As a Pebble user to this day (I'm wearing one right now in fact) this is amazing! I'm hopeful that this leads to development and fixes on these old devices that haven't been possible until now.
And who knows, maybe we could even see new smartwatches running a derivative of the Pebble OS at some point? The old hardware's great but since they're not being made anymore it's only a matter of time before they break down.
Good for them, but also, what a colossal waste. Fitbit brought Pebble, Google brought Fitbit. They had everything to make a better version of a product that people _loved_, that _I_ loved. And what had them done? Nothing but a blatant display of anticompetitive power. (Yes I am still mad, 8 years later)
The title is misleading.
Proprietary code has been removed
from the repo and the published
repo will not compile because of it.
Google states:
"" This is for information only.""
""This is the latest version of the internal
repository from Pebble Technology providing
the software to run on Pebble watches.
Proprietary source code has been removed
from this repository and it will not
compile as-is""
This is pretty awesome. I had a Pebble but the battery went out and was sad to see that you had to buy used / refurbished. Being epaper and lasting for so long the best part of it was that it just managed notifications with my phone. I moved on to the Apple Watch from my brother (series 0) and it took awhile for the Apple Watch to have its killer application which was a fitness tracker.
You can still get watches which use the same MIP display technology as the Pebble and run similar "smart-ish" software with very long battery life. They tend to be marketed more as fitness/sports watches rather than smartwatches though.
I love my transflective MIP Garmin Fenix watch, but it's not nearly as high-contrast as my wife's Kindle, which uses a reflective MIP e-paper display.
I would be an ideal candidate for a rePebble if I were not as happy as I am with my Garmin - though with their recent changes to inReach plans, crazy prices and lackluster features on the Fenix 8, and trend towards AMOLED displays (away from their roots, chasing the Apple watch market) they're not looking as amazing as they once did.
I think you're mixing up e-paper (generic term for non-emissive reflective displays) and e-ink (the trademark for a specific type of e-paper display). The Pebble used a MIP LCD, just like Coros and Garmins MIP models, it never had anything in common with the e-ink displays used on Kindles.
Every Pebble model used an LCD display. It being epaper has to be one of the most pervasive myths in tech history. It was a low powered, reflective LCD, so it did improve on other LCDs in those areas somewhat, but it wasn't eink technology.
Managed to post my comment after dang moved the comments to this thread, so reposting here:
Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory:
Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue.
It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.
It was based on FreeRTOS, but FreeRTOS at the time was extremely bare bones and only provided a preemptive scheduler, task management, and synchronization primitives. Everything else (memory management, I/O, ...) had to come either from whatever libc implementation was in use, or be built from scratch.
In my opinion it's not always the most readable codebase, due to some idiosyncratic style choices, but it definitely has the advantages of being small and focused.
To somebody who's completely out of the loop, hears about Pebble for the first time—why is this big news? Are we going to see novel software written for defunct hardware, or is the hardware going to evolve now that the software is open?
It's one of the original smart watches. What really sets it apart from modern ones is the e-ink display and dead simple interface (just a few buttons, no touchscreen). This simplicity means that it continues to do what it does well and doesn't really feel like it has aged badly. Certainly I would rather wear a pebble than a gen 1 Samsung watch or moto360.
It's a delightful bit of kit that was sadly abandoned by owner and it's nice that they are open-sourcing a dead product instead of just leaving it to rot like so many other electronics are.
It was an LCD[0] but you are right that they marketed it as "epaper". But it certainly was not people normally think of as epaper where there are colored capsules that can hold their image without power. The Pebble just had an LCD that looked visually similar to epaper.
People really like their Pebble watches, and this will help keep them alive into the future. In some future, we may see new hardware produced that could use some derivative of the resulting operating system.
I'm more of a mechanical-movement person myself, but I'm also fond of these little e-ink things; and indeed, they have come a long way. Maybe somebody makes a true e-ink pebble and designs it well, too.
Given the original Pebble folks are using this to spin up a re-launch ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845185 ), my guess is the Pebble folks just know someone on the inside at Google who managed to get the lawyers to sign off on it.
From my experience in large (and small) companies, trying to get something that is internally dead open sourced is usually not a huge fight against people saying no, just a laundry-list of things that need to be done before everyone will sign off on it.
One motivated person at a decently high enough level can get it pushed through, as long as whoever the person making the decision asks about it says, 'eh, ok.'
> Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post).
google isn't doing anything with it, its not really a competitor to androidwear, and it probably has enough pebble nerd fans within google itself to push for it.
Hopefully this will accelerate the production of new hardware at some point. I misplaced my old Pebble Time and was excited for the Pebble Time 2 but those hopes were dashed when they closed up and fitbit had no interest in continuing to produce the watches that made Pebble what it was.
Hardware is hard to almost impossible as a sustainable business as a small company unless there is a thriving ODM market and you can just use your own software.
Still have my Pebble watch from 10 years ago in a drawer somewhere. Great watch, good times.
I'm back to a "classic" analog watch as I realized I don't really want notifications. But I might buy a smart watch (probably Apple watch at this point since I have a bunch of iOS hardware) for the health features (HR, EKG, etc.)
I had forgotten Pebble used Tintin-themed code names (which I assume was the inspiration for the Snowy assistant app's name?)...
Tangentially & coincidentally related: the Tintin & Snowy[0] characters entered the/a Public Domain[1] at the beginning of this year!
Which means your lawyer might advise that you might now actually be able to use an actual original Snowy illustration[2] for the app logo...
I mention this primarily because I am currently (in theory) developing a Tintin-themed game for an annual Public Domain game jam[3]. In reality, I've spent more time trying to locate scans of Tintin-related documents/illustrations[4] that actually fall under the constraints necessary for even US Public Domain[5].
----
[0] Milou.
[1] Well, actually[1a], maybe only in the US for 2025? And 2034 in Berne-associated countries? And 2054 in Belgium? Or any year if you're an AI, seemingly? Okay, perhaps it's better to not use an original illustration. Such are the joys of actually trying to interact with the Public Domain in good faith[1b].
[1b] It just now occurs to me to wonder whether or not Milou can actually be referred to as "Snowy" given Tintin wasn't translated into English until the 1950s (late 1950s for the use of the name "Snowy" rather "Milou") (and as late as 1989 for the first title "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets"), given translations are AIUI new works?
[4] Pretty interesting finding different variants on archive.org, e.g. [4a][4b][4c]. (After all, "entering the Public Domain" is not of much value if the related material isn't accessible or the status is unclear. (Which is why recent trends in FLOSS project copyright year ranges statements bug me...))
Well, better would have been investing in it and making it better. At least they didn't produce some awful spy on you thing that had nothing to do with p and called it pebble
Do you think they have a future? I love the idea of a watch I can write simple little apps on. I looked at garmin, it was more challenging. the apple watch just has such a short battery life, I can't stand to charge it so much
In addition, there's also some "up & coming" Rust language projects which fall somewhere along the "framework" to "OS" spectrum (in part, via https://arewertosyet.com):
On the desktop side, I seem to recall in the past, OS such as BeOS & QNX have been presented as a possible future for real time desktop OS that hasn't arrived.
As someone else already mentioned, PREEMPT_RT being merged for Linux is a recent development somewhat in this space which could have impact on both desktop & "embedded" situations but suitability varies dependent on, say, whether you're wanting to use it for audio production versus controlling some 10 tonne robot operating next to humans.
Hope this at least goes some way to answering your question. :)
This case looks okay. It's converting a double to an int64_t and then back to double for comparison. It doesn't really suffer from the typical reason why floating point comparison is frowned upon, such as catastrophic cancellation.
I've once optimized a function to be faster, and in a unit test asserted that the old slower version gives exactly the same floating point answer as the new optimized version. It's doable in some cases.
I've only done a little bit of arduino programming, but for that you had to import a whole library for floating point math which took a huge amount of space, and many chips didn't even have hardware support for it.
People passing cynical comments at Google need to understand that at a big co like Google, something like this doesn't 'just happen'. It probably happened because some passionate L6/L7 engineer wanted to do it and pushed through the bureaucracy to get approvals for it, probably largely on their own time (by which I mean that this was at best a side-project for them and at worst a distraction that was losing them favor with their bosses). At every point in the process, they probably had to justify what they were doing to their leads, to lawyers, to privacy reviewers, who had no real stake in it and so had nothing to lose by saying No. They almost certainly won't receive any career progress out of this and would risk a setback if something slips through the cracks (such as some unredacted proprietary information).
They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do. Good things happen through the actions of individuals like this. We should acknowledge and celebrate it when they do, anti-big-tech cynicism can wait.
I do wonder how they successfully justified this to the higher ups. If anything, I would like to learn from them so I can better justify the things I want to do..
The source code has zero business value to Google at this point – they have another smartwatch OS and there's never gonna be a business case for a company of Google's scale to revive a niche product like this. Releasing means getting free PR on Hacker News and a free morale boost for employees who care about this kind of thing.
Unrelated to smartwatches, but the usual reason that I've heard on why video drivers are not open-sourced directly (AMDGPU =/= AMDGPU PRO and Nvidia's recent parallel driver efforts) is that there are copyright (old code that is not written by ATI/AMD or Nvidia/3dfx and AMD/Nvidia not getting the rights to it) and patent (techniques used may be patented by their competitors) concerns.
The statute of limitations is 3 years for copyright infringement and 6 years for patents.
The plaintiff would have to show actual financial loss due to the infringement. In the case of the pebble assets, that seems exceedingly unlikely.
Generously assume for the sake of argument that the entire codebase is a straight up copy of Samsung and Apple’s IP. What damages have been caused by that IP sitting dormant on Google’s hard drives for the past six years?
> The statute of limitations is 3 years for copyright infringement
... nope. Not even in the US, where "3 years" as you claim is from the possible discovery date, not the infrigment date (https://www.michaelbest.com/Newsroom/340003/US-Supreme-Court...), and this would probably only accrue when the source code is released (as it can be argued that it would be difficult to see a more subtle copyright infrigment on object code).
Also statutory damages exists, so even for no revenue there is a reasonable possibility that they will be sued for that alone (similar to how game and music piracy lawsuits work).
> and 6 years for patents
Other jurisdictions like Germany (no limits) exists.
Isn’t it valuable to Google to keep potential competitors from getting expensive IP for free?
“PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time.” [0]
It's 12 years old. They put good work in. But it's missing an absurd amount of stuff the mass market considered mandatory a decade ago. Consumer electronics, for better or worse, is mostly about spending enough money to get your product name in front of hundreds of millions, and Google knows that well.
Right, like this world's largest company called Apple, which gets most of the revenue from its hardware sales. Pixels are not cheap either and given its low specs (Tensor SOC), the per-unit margin has to be quite decent. OTOH, there are significant fixed development costs which you want to spread over as many devices as possible to increase the net margin.
The lackluster value and sales of Google hardware is no master plan, it's a simple incompetency.
Something like this would be bizarrely easy if you had the ear of the right person. (i.e. someone who would tell legal etc. "you gotta do it" when asked)
Reason why is, it's a feel-good thing that aligns well with Old Google values, and Google's not yet old enough for "Why bother doing anything at all?" to be an acceptable vocalized response.
It has standard, if not worse, dysfunction with internal conflict at this point. But there just isn't room to come up with a good reason to not open-source the decade-old OS.
> wonder how they successfully justified this to the higher ups
Commoditise your complements.
Injecting competition into the watch market reduces the chances one of the majors, e.g. Apple or Altman, runs away with the wearables sector if it takes off again in respect of AI.
From my experience with working there, it wasn't actually that hard to advocate and get things open sourced that my team worked on after Google made the decision to kill it. (ndash video player stuff that was being done by the team I was on in Fiber @ Google Waterloo). Management is on the whole open to these things, and Google -- unlike other companies I've been at -- has an official process for this, and it feels on the whole fair.
For all the sins that Google commits, they're generally decent about the whole open source community. There's things they rely on they should be providing funding for, certainly. But they're good about letting their people contribute, and often good about opening things up to the outside world.
Of course this project is bigger and more complicated, and clearly had tendrils into a lot of other things, so...
I think it's perfectly reasonable to celebrate this action and the individuals who championed it while also being cynical of the big tech orgs that resist changes like this for the reasons described.
The only financial benefit for Google that I could guess would be to drive complement prices to zero (assuming some Pebble refresh is successful), as part of competition against Apple watch.
> Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post).
Which is ironic because Google needs to improve their reputation about sunsetting early. This is one of the main arguments for why many businesses for why they do not employ their alternatives
IIRC based on my experience open sourcing some code for a paper, I think you just need to get VP approval, which is probably not that hard if you are a well respected L6/7 in your org.
They could consider open source everything you have killed ( https://killedbygoogle.com ) over the years.
May be the whole design and development process from the start should be everything they do could one day be open sourced. So be aware what you do and what you comment.
It's basically impossible for Google to open-source anything built in house, because it all relies heavily on Borg and various other proprietary tools and libraries that don't exist outside the Googleplex.
Pebble, on the other hand, was built fully outside Google and only ended up there via a circuitous route (the Fitbit acquisition), so this is not a concern.
I mean, Google develops three other open source operating systems and is a major contributor to other operating systems, as well from other vast open projects like Chromium. It's not as if open-sourcing an operating system is even slightly out of character for Google.
Maybe...the cynic in me says that someone feels this needs to be preserved because it will become another Google relic in favor of something newer, or more shiny. Or likely something written in Go...just a guess on my part...
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I wrote a blog post about our plans to bring Pebble back, sustainably. https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back
We got our original start on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3827868), it's a pleasure to be back.
If you're interested in getting a new Pebble, check out https://rePebble.com
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