[leo_e]

As someone dealing with open-source compliance in distributed systems, the purity tests in these comments are exhausting.

Hardware is messy. IP licensing for sensors and radios is a nightmare. Getting a functional OS out with "only" a few binary blobs is a massive engineering and legal victory.

I'd rather have a working, 95% open ecosystem that I can actually hack on, than a 100% pure theoretical one that never ships. Kudos to Eric for navigating the legal minefield to make this happen.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

As one of those commenters: It's actually super easy. It's fine for your product to only be mostly open source. It's definitely completely understandable if you can't open up some of the blobs that you yourself licensed. All I ask is that if you can't actually ship 100% of the software on the device needed to actually provide the advertised features, that you don't make a big headline claiming that it's 100% open source.

[drabbiticus]

For the sake of easy reference, I'll leave the relevant snippet from the linked article so people can decide for themselves with a bit more information:

> Another important note - some binary blobs and other non-free software components are used today in PebbleOS and the Pebble mobile app (ex: the heart rate sensor on PT2 , Memfault library, and others). Optional non-free web services, like Wispr-flow API speech recognizer, are also used. These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.

[compsciphd]

if the blobs were built into firmware, so didn't need to be shipped, would you then say its a 100% open source software device? I'm not sure there's a huge difference.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That seems like a separate question? Like, I'm not strictly opposed to getting into an argument about the line between hardware/firmware/software and if/when/where blobs are tolerable, but in this case it is completely unambiguous that the software Pebble ships includes software that is not open source, while writing a headline that claims they are shipping 100% open source.

[compsciphd]

their suite is open source, what's needed to run on a particular hardware device isn't fully open source.

example, could one create a "VM" to run a virtual pebble watch without any of the firmware blobs? (I'm not saying that one exists today, just speaking theoretically, ala a virtual android environment).

Does that mean their software isn't open source? I'd argue no.

One could argue that trying to pass off the pebble watch itself as open source is perhaps "wrong" (but as you say, can debate the value of worrying about blobs), but I don't think that means the "pebble watch software" isn't open source as the title says.

Or better put, there's no legal restrictions on someone creating a "pebble competitor" using the pebble watch with different hardware (that doesn't depend on the blobs included for current hardware).

[cdibona]

The closest we got to a fully open source android release was probably in the Nexus one days with some 9 proprietary blobs and , worse, user space support programs (IIRC the compass calibration routines, annoyingly.) , all for various chip/radio support.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

And look how that ended up.