>Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more restrictive license on their contributions and wrapping a closed-source UI around it.
Is that legal?
Is that legal?
If you look at the link they have for proof, the change was GPLv3 to a dual-license AGPLv3 + not-really-specified license you can privately arrange.
They have to respect the original GPLv3 license, which means that Core has to continue to publish all libpebble3 changes under a GPLv3 compatible license, and they do appear to be doing so, even if they also offer a separate license for sale.
I feel like rebble is phrasing this a little misleadingly too. The neutral phrasing here would be "Pebble forked our work, and per our GPL license is continuing to make all their changes available to all users for free. If you contribute to their repo, not ours, they now require a CLA, and for code they write you can also pay them for a difference license (though it's always also available for free under the GPL)"
There may be something that's real here, but "forked our library and added a CLA" feels normal and expected, not worth hostile phrasing.
That being said, libpebblecommon seems to be Apache 2.0. But this part of the diff seems questionable:
> # Copyright and Licensing
Copyright 2025 Core Devices LLC
How does Core own the copyright to this code?
Distributing a mix of AGPL and GPLv3 code is pretty reasonable to do, right, and I think basically all the user's rights under the GPLv3 are being fulfilled just fine.
I agree the commercial license could be dicey, but I assume in reality it's the usual AGPL thing where it's "If you pay, you don't have to comply with the network-services bit, but you now get the code under the GPLv3, so you have to make a network service and ensure your users _never_ get binaries containing this code".
Or, possibly even more realistically, they've put that there and if anyone says "We'll pay $3M for un-encumbered code" they'll rewrite the code from scratch to make it un-encumbered by the old GPL code, and until someone says a number big enough to cover the rewrite they'll never actually do anything.
> Copyright and Licensing
A forward-looking section applying to all new changes going forward I guess.
As long as they've preserved the old copyright notice somewhere, and it's given to users who request it, it doesn't really matter what the README says does it?
I promise I'm not a shill for them. I do think what they're doing comes off as overall not great, but not as "willful GPL violation" (they're still sharing code), and not as egregiously malicious as the blog makes it sound, so the blog author has me a little unsympathetic with their own misleading (in my opinion) phrasing of this stuff.
Not exactly the above case, but from the GNU GPL version 3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt):
13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single
combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this
License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work,
but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License,
section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the
combination as such.Literally linked in the article at exactly the words in the quote you're replying to.
They link to this as their proof: https://github.com/coredevices/libpebble3/commit/35853d45cd0...
Yes, this is an attempt to nerd-snipe you into giving a marginally more informed opinion, while also shame you for being too lazy to click a single link, but not too lazy to type an entire comment.
Also generally agpl 3.0 is considered a viral license, so accessing it over a network is considered a form of distribution (which is probably why they dont like it) but relicensing it is just a core "nope" type of thing.
(also dual licensing seems like you're relicensing effectively if the purchaser doesn't have to respect the gpl license, but not as clear to me)