Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.
Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.
My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.
> They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out.
It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did.
Rebble took the original open-source Pebble work of thousands of independent developers, scraped it off the original store, and is re-offering it within their own walled garden and calling it "theirs".
It's great Rebble kept things alive but they seem to be fearing a second one of themselves.
> being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.
501c3 offers one narrow form of tax exempt status for a very specific type of non-profit organization with specific privileges and duties. Every organization is unique and many non-profit, tax-exempt, and even charitable organizations exist outside of that specific framework.
If they're not soliciting donations from you I'm not sure why you'd care about their federal tax status.
> If they're not soliciting donations from you I'm not sure why you'd care about their federal tax status.
Because if they appear to be a normal company but call themselves a non-profit, I want to know what that actually means to them.
Being a non-profit is generally a reason for community goodwill towards a company. Therefore being a nonprofit is attractive both to companies doing good, and charlatans seeking to capitalize on that goodwill.
If you call yourself a nonprofit but don't talk anywhere about what that means to you and why, then you look like that second option.
> If they're not soliciting donations from you I'm not sure why you'd care about their federal tax status.
Well, if they portray themselves as a "nonprofit" then most people who read that will think they are a 501c3, which is almost always the case. I don't know why they don't qualify for that status (if they don't), but it's possible that it's a reason I would care about when deciding whom to side with on issues like this one.
The battle of for-profit versus non-profit comes across differently than for-profit versus Michigan Domestic Non-Profit Corporation (which for some reason does not qualify for IRS nonprofit designation).
It's not "almost always the case". It may be the case for nonprofits that people donate to, but in general there are quite a few 501c4 around, for example, and there are many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Types
Looking over Michigan's Nonprofit Corporation Act it seems a Domestic Non-Profit Corporation would meet the IRS 501c3 requirements. The act even borrows definitions from IRS Publication 501.
It looks like Michigan Domestic Non-Profit Corporations cannot allow their proceeds to benefit private parties. So they are a nonprofit if that helps you pick a side. It seems like an asinine point to pivot on, though.
> It seems like an asinine point to pivot on, though.
Whether or not they are a nonprofit is not a point I care about on its own.
What is a point to pivot on, is if they claim to be a nonprofit, but make that claim in a misleading way.
It is highly unusual to be a 501c3-compatible state nonprofit but not actually bother to become a 501c3. You're essentially opting to pay federal taxes unnecessarily. It makes one wonder why.
I am neither an accountant nor a lawyer, but I have set up a 501c3 before.
I think you have a misunderstanding of how that works. In many cases, you need both the state and federal non-profit designation (i.e. a Michigan domestic non-profit corporation would not pay state income taxes on charitable income + that same corporation would need the 501c3 designation from the IRS to have the same benefit at the federal level).
Do you have positive confirmation that they are not filing as a 501c3?
> I think you have a misunderstanding of how that works. In many cases, you need both the state and federal non-profit designation (i.e. a Michigan domestic non-profit corporation would not pay state income taxes on charitable income + that same corporation would need the 501c3 designation from the IRS to have the same benefit at the federal level).
Yes, I'm aware. And since the lions share of taxes is often federal, the 501c3 step does not generally get skipped, like it does here. Why would they voluntarily give themselves federal tax exposure if they were able to avoid it?
> Do you have positive confirmation that they are not filing as a 501c3?
I am positive that it has been over 2 years since they filed as a Michigan domestic non-profit. Therefore we all have positive confirmation that they did not attempt to become a 501c3 with an organization capable of doing so, at the time they became a nonprofit. It does not take 2 years to become a 501c3.
> Why would they voluntarily give themselves federal tax exposure if they were able to avoid it?
Right. That wouldn't be particularly smart, even to someone who doesn't fully understand the ins and outs of tax/corporate law. Is it possible that perhaps they _do_ have their 501c3 designation and are just communicating it poorly?
Lack of positive confirmation that they are a 501c3 != positive confirmation that they are _not_ a 501c3
All 501c3 are publicly listed. They are not on the list. We have positive confirmation that they are not a 501c3, right now, nor have they ever been one.
The possibility suggested earlier was that they have applied but are not yet a 501c3. I lack positive confirmation that they have never attempted to become a 501c3.
Since it has been two years since they became a nonprofit, I think that implies they either have no intention of becoming a 501c3 or else tried to become one and failed because they did not meet the criteria. But technically it is possible that it is just delayed.
Ah, I see. I don't think I realized that 501c3 are publicly listed and that we do have positive confirmation that they aren't on that list. Thanks for clarifying.
>> They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out.
> It's understandable that Rebble fears someone doing this, since this is what Rebble did.
That's an extremely uncharitable take. It's not like Rebble drove Pebble out of business. What I gather is basically Pebble fell apart on its own, and Rebble picked up the pieces to keep things working.
It seems what Core wants do here is take what Rebble build/maintained and drive Rebble into irrelevance.
The 501c3 tax exception is specifically for charitable organizations, and the law and IRS interpretations exclude a number of groups that would colloquially fall under that description. On top of that there are many groups who aren't doing charitable work, but want to reinvest all revenue back into the organization and not be beholden to shareholders (private or public).
That's not true. Charitable organizations are just one of many groups that qualify as a 501c3.
Groups dedicated to scientific, literary or educational purposes also quality.
The reason this is a problem is that Rebble is using their being a "non-profit" as a point of advertisement but there is essentially no difference between someone owning a for-profit company, and someone controlling and heading a non-profit company where they set their own salary and are not a 501c3.
> Any chance they recently changed status, and it's just not showing up yet?
The Rebble Foundation incorporated in 2023, so I don't think so.
I agree it's strange. The advantages of being a 501c3 in the US are immense, and if you meet the criteria, it is not difficult to become one. Essentially every organization larger than 6 people in the US that could be a 501c3, is one, for this reason.
So if they aren't, I assume it's because they can't be. Which makes me wonder why.
Sure, Rust Foundation fits the criteria of a 501c6. It is not itself a commercial enterprise, but is an advocacy body for the Rust language and its users.
Rebble is not that. One of the key defining features of a 501c6 is that it exists to support other businesses that are associated, like a Chamber of Commerce. If Rebble did this then this whole issue we're commenting on the thread for wouldn't be an issue.
Pebble went out of business but Core is set up very differently. They have an incredibly lean team and Eric appears to have self-funded much of the HW and SW development before taking a dime from customers.
There's a chance that some awful fate will befall Eric, of course, but other than that I am not especially concerned that the new company will fold. Eric seems to understand what caused that outcome, and is specifically looking to avoid making the same mistakes.
Does it? I'm more about trusting persons than ever. When the shareholders comes, thats when the enshitification process really starts. I also wish Tony Fadell would take over Nest again.
>Does it? I'm more about trusting persons than ever. When the shareholders comes, thats when the enshitification process really starts. I also wish Tony Fadell would take over Nest again.
Founders are the people who get money in exchange for taking the business public. The guy will be on his yacht when the shareholders arrive to screw things up.
You have a bias, I know plenty of people who are just content making a great product and don't sell out their customers. Maybe they don't get to be yacht-rich. But not everybody wants that. Maybe hard to imagine in these HN circles.
They sent an email a few minutes after I posted, saying that their fulfillment centre dropped the ball and they're escalating internally. I guess complaining on HN worked.
Hope they can figure out the dispute with Rebble. Maybe they end up hosting apps on a package manager and create some binding contract?
Yeah. I bought a black duo out of nostalgia and wanting pebble to succeed, but not interested in the time and realized I don't love them enough to want to wear a white one. Fickle me, I guess.
Yeah, I wanted a black duo but find the white and time to be really ugly. OTOH I read someone saying that their duo came with really bad buttons, probably as a result of the parts laying in a warehouse for years, so maybe I dodged a bullet...
It is the HashiCorp fiasco all over again. HashiCorp thinks third-party is profiting from Terraform, they relicense, Terraform gets forked into OpenTofu.
Here, Rebble says Core is profiting from their work (hey, look at your licenses). It would be a direct violation of their ToS though, since there is this clause:
> 4. Services Usage Limits
>
> You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, access to the Service, or Content accessed through use of the Service, without Rebble’s express written permission.
So I don't know what to think honestly, I don't see any bad actors here...
From my experience working on SaaS, and improving ops at large organizations, I've seen that "on-call culture" often exists inversely proportional to incentive alignment.
When engineers bear the full financial consequences of 3AM pages, they're more likely to make systems more resilient by adding graceful failure modes. When incident response becomes an organizational checkbox divorced from financial outcomes and planning, you get perpetual firefighting.
The most successful teams I've seen treat on-call like a leading indicator - every incident represents unpriced technical debt that should be systematically eliminated. Each alert becomes an investment opportunity rather than a burden to be rotated.
Big companies aren't missing the resources to fix this; they just don't have the aligned incentive structures that make fixing it rational for individuals involved.
The most rational thing to do as an individual on a bad rotation: quit or transfer.
This assumes that the engineers in question get to choose how to allot their time, and are _allowed_ to spend time to add graceful failure modes. I cannot tell you how many stories I have heard of, and companies I have directly worked at, where this power is not granted to engineers, and they are instead directed to "stop working on technical debt, we'll make time to come back to that later". Of course, time is never found later, and the 3am pages continue because the people who DO choose how time is allocated are not the ones waking up at 3am to fix problems.
Definitely an issue but I think there's a little room for push back. Work done outside normal working hours is automatically the highest priority, by definition. It's helpful to remind people of that.
If it's important enough to deserve a page, it's top priority work. The reverse is also true (if a page isn't top priority, disable the paging alert and stick it on a dashboard or periodic checklist)
IMO it's when the incident response and readiness practice imposes a direct backpressure on feature delivery that you get the issues actually fixed and a resilient system.
if it's just the engineer while product and management see no real cost then people burn out and leave.
> The most successful teams I've seen treat on-call like a leading indicator - every incident represents unpriced technical debt that should be systematically eliminated. Each alert becomes an investment opportunity rather than a burden to be rotated.
> When engineers bear the full financial consequences of 3AM pages, they're more likely to make systems more resilient by adding graceful failure modes.
Making engineers handle 3 AM issues caused by their code is one thing, but making them bear the financial consequences is another. That’s how you create a blame-game culture where everyone is afraid to deploy at the end of the day or touch anything they don’t fully understand.
"Financial consequences" probably mean "the success of the startup, so your options won't be worth less than the toilet paper", rather than "you'll pay for the downtime out of your salary".
At a lot of companies engineers are involved in picking the work. It's silly to hire competent problem solvers and treat them as unskilled workers needing micro-management.
Besides, if you set the on-call system up so people get free time the following day to compensate for waking up at night, the manager can't pretend there's no cost.
Bad management will fail on both of these of course, but there's no saving that beyond finding a better company.
This assumes that the engineers who wrote the code that caused the 3 AM pages will still be around to suffer the consequences of the 3 AM pages. This is a lot of times, not true, especially in an environment which fostered moving around internally every now and then. Happens in at least one of the FAANGs.
Minimizing 3am pages is good for engineers but it is not necessarily the best investment for the company. Beyond a certain scale it is probably not a good investment to try to get rid of all pages.
China loaning USD to Africa is even better for the US. They get to consume the equivalent of that amount of cash - it will not be redeemed for some time now.
I've been using Colemak for a little bit more than a decade now. Super happy with it.
I switched while interning at a ~failing startup. I was a Canadian in the US, and had forgotten to plan to do stuff over Thanksgiving weekend. I had nothing to do, so I switched to Colemak over the weekend. I spent the weekend doing typing training videos, then spent the remaining ~1mo of my co-op term working (almost) entirely in Colemak. I wouldn't switch back to qwerty without a really compelling reason.
Years later, I'm super happy. I can use QWERTY under duress, but rather not.
I’m in basically the same situation. The minor annoyance of key bindings is worth it for significantly reduced hand strain and slightly faster typing speeds.
I once interned at an easily google-able Secondlife competitor. They fought against NSFW content for a long time, but then figured out how to fix it by:
1. Incentivizing users (with in-game currency) for reporting NSFW content, and
2. Restricting NSFW content to only people who bought an all-access pass (ID verified at time of purchase)
This opened up a new revenue stream for the company, and dealt with the NSFW content in one swoop.
A) I don’t think #2 would be A good idea for a kids game, and B) kids will absolutely start to game #1 with shill accounts and you may well wind up increasing the amount of ‘evil stuff’ as kids bring it to the platform for the sole purpose of reporting it to get Robux/swag.
"Right to have data deleted" can be 'circumvented' if the data is critical part of the system or is needed for legal purpose (for example it can be mandatory to keep 1 year of IP logs and data associated with it)
In previous companies I have worked for, we did instant soft-delete, then hard anonymisation after 15-30days and then hard delete after a year.
That means the data was not recoverable for customer but could still be recovered for legal purpose.
There's a time period before which you need to permanently delete the data. A soft delete will allow you to delete the data quickly and you can see what happens. If everything is okay you can then purge your database of all soft deleted data.
It shouldn’t be. These laws at least have the nuance to understand that data can’t be immediately deleted from Backups and that in such instances where deletes are complicated the customer is notified.
IANAL but the laws have carve outs for backup retention, etc.
A simple technical solution is to store all data with per user encryption keys, and then just delete the key. This obviously doesn't let you prove to anyone else that you've deleted all copies of the key, but you can use it as a way to have higher confidence you don't inadvertently leak it.
Ideally they'd encrypt the customer content with a key provided by the customer and destroyed when the customer requests account deletion. The customer would still be able to use their key to decrypt backups that they get prior to the request. If the customer changes their mind, they just upload the key again (along with the backup, if necessary).
Of course, this means trusting Atlassian to actually delete the key on request, but there's not much reason for them not to.
Restoring data from backup is the most common data recovery technique. Lots of information there to start from if you are interested in how data recovery relates to privacy laws.
Rebble's "one red line" is "there has to be a future for Rebble in there." They fear being replaced/made irrelevant after Core builds their own infrastructure using Rebble's work. They want guarantees that if they give Core access to the app store data, Core won't build a proprietary/walled garden that cuts Rebble out. There's also emphasis on "our work," "we built this," "we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." They feel Eric isn't acknowledging where his infrastructure came from.
Core Devices' thing is explicitly stating concern about relying on a third party (Rebble) for "critical services" his customers depend on. If "Rebble leadership changes their mind," they can't guarantee customer experience. They wants the app store archive to be "freely available" and "not controlled by one organization." They don't want to need "permission from Rebble" before building features (like free weather, voice-to-text) that might compete with Rebble's paid services. The fundamental fear seems to be business risk: being at the mercy of a nonprofit's decisions when his company has customers and obligations.
Neither side seems to trust the other's long-term intentions, creating an impasse where both feel existentially threatened by the other's preferred arrangement.
My take: I bought a watch in 2014. After the pebble 2 duo black fiasco (they ran out of stock, offered a white instead which I accepted 2 weeks ago, never shipped, and have ghosted my emails asking for shipping timelines.) I had high hopes, but given the messy interaction with the OSS world I'm considering cancelling my order for the duo and time two.