A commercial entity in a previously community-owned space – For 9 years, the community has spiritually reclaimed all of Pebble. Now, a for-profit entity has entered the space and claims a place at its center. What to make of it?
The original and popular Pebble series of smartwatches had been manufactured under the leadership of Eric Migicovsky between 2013 and 2016, until the company ran out of money and had to be sold.
Rebble (and its legal arm, Rebble Foundation) is the grassroots community effort that is most notable for having maintained the app database and provided Pebble-related cloud services for the past 9 years.
Today, the Pebble mark is owned by Core Devices LLC, Eric Migicovsky's new company, set out to produce new smartwatches since early 2025.
I, the author, have not been active in the relevant communities up until now.
The setup between Rebble and Pebble directly touches upon a few glaring, fundamental questions: who does, who pays for, who is paid from, who benefits, and who profits from open source and community work? My interpretation is that the currently ongoing conflict [1 2 3] is, at its core, a symptom of these questions not having been satisfyingly answered, and here, I will present how I think this conflict should have been avoided in the first place.
In the context of his new company, Eric has and still is bringing up "sustainability" as an important goal. This is something that he is hoping to improve upon compared to his prior attempt: in Eric's old blog post Why Pebble failed, one key reason for why the company ran out of money was that its income was attached to a consumer hardware product release cycle. One of the possible ideas his article bring up is that Pebble should have "charged a subscription" in order to fund ongoing development.
To him, "sustainability" seems to mean that the company can keep existing and therefore can keep providing services to existing customers. The existing community's perspective, voiced through Rebble's website, is rather that "sustainability" means that services (think web services, updates, ongoing development of new cool stuff) can be provided detached of a single entity, and therefore, basically forever, as long as there is an interest in doing so.
Every reasonable person would agree that maintaining software costs money, hence it is a very natural thing to collect funding for continued software development – inherently, just because it needs to be paid for. In the end, this money will always come from the consumer in some way or another, which, for a luxury product such as smartwatches, is quite fair.
To consider who is structurally equipped to argue this position, let us say that a for-profit company (where there is profit skimming) argues on this ground to get its customers on their good side when introducing some recurring subscription fee.
To me, this is dishonest. I do not buy corporate products to "support the project", that is not in the nature of the transaction. If I "support the project", then I expect the funds actually stay bound to the purpose, and (structurally) that they cannot be skimmed.
The question of who should be paid for their efforts on Pebble is already in itself reason to dispute the questions outlined above, and it can arise even in communities that have a healthy structure. In the case of Core Devices LLC, I consider the structure to be unhealthy from a community perspective – power is centered on the one individual who happened to have brought in the initial money, putting everyone else in a bad position for making their case about how funds should be distributed.
But the possibility of profit skimming makes the situation unfair – being a for-profit entity and sustainability in the community's sense are fundamentally at odds. Picture this: in some years, Core Devices LLC might cease operation, and with it, any excess profits it had may be skimmed. It would be precisely these profits that, morally, I would treat as stolen from a community that, yet again, would have to provide services for itself.
This is not a personal judgement of any of the involved players, it is merely my opinion based on structural analysis of the entities. What I want is not a "promise" from Eric Migicovsky to not take out funds. What I want is a structural guarantee that not one person does what they please with it. Money handled by a non-profit entity cannot "disappear" from the ecosystem in the way I described.
This, to me, is the meaning of the Rebble project and why it is important. Because when the Pebble company died, it was finally a brand I could truly love freely, without worrying about being deceived by a corporation, knowing that everything was up to the community's hands now.
To me, it is not right to walk into a community-maintained space and attempt to start a profitable business there. And this is why I got so mad when I heard a new company would be making new watches. I strongly believe we should have gotten a cooperative, where consumers have structural membership power besides just as a market participant, instead of a new startup. That would have been the "sustainable" thing to do. But I expect Eric doesn't know how to do that, and that he doesn't care.
A few notes. ⋄ Eric has claimed not to have made profits from the Pebble company besides his salary and I am not alleging that this is false. ⋄ I am meaning to use "skimming profits" as a neutral phrasing for the market-economic action of "taking excess profit out of a business" (for example, to pay dividends), and I apologize if this might not be the proper English term. ⋄ Rebble Foundation's structure could and should be improved in such a way that it can structurally be held accountable for its use of funds by its community. ⋄ Large thanks to the fellow Rebblers in the Discord chats who helped refine my position as well as this page. ⋄ The capital market is a reality that is hard to simply ignore, but not everything has to play by its rules. We can and should envision the utopia we desire. ♡
22.11.2025 (updated 23.11.2025) | personal pages