Well the Pebble specific parts are. This is an unfortunate state of affairs from hardware manufacturers, they are very late to the open source game, if at all.
Between the cross-licensing of hardware IP blocks and 3rd party software which never sees the light of the day, hardware manufacturers work like a secretive three letter agency to be able to control every part of their ecosystem.
I tend to understand where this comes from. It's part business, part continuation of old customs and the way they did it and being able to control obsolescence to be able push new things to the market.
However, if the periphery of the software you put out is closed source, even though this periphery is optional, it's not fair or ethical to say it's 100% open source.
From my perspective, it can be said it's open core, and it's pretty fair, and acceptable in my case, but writing 100% Open Source* (*: 100% of the open part of the software stack, exceptions apply) is not fair game. It's misleading.
Seems a bunch are angry about this, honestly, 100% of what they made/control is open source was a good enough bar for me. Specially if all closed components are optional. I value the flexibility of being able to use or not even closed stuff. It's unclear to me what the issue is, false advertisement ? This is as good as it gets for things like this, maybe the "100%" was indelicate, but I wouldn't go so far as misleading. I can also understand the hardware companies, history has shown that the vast majority of industry actors have a purely parasitical relation to open source, and have no qualms copying/stealing IP.
Personally, I'm not angry. On the contrary, I'm pretty neutral about closed-source, optional add-ons. I started playing/working with computers pretty early, and the current state is an utopia when compared to olden times in terms of Free and Open Source software (OTOH, both Free Software and Open Source is under heavy attack because of many reasons I won't enter here).
What bothers me is "100%" part of the open source claim. I personally like the Debian model a lot. It's DFSG compliant by default, and if non-free software is needed, it's attainable. Debian is "as Free as you want, as closed as you need".
I see, new Pebble follows the same model, and it's perfectly fine, but branding it as 100% Open Source is not.
I'll not discuss hardware companies. It's a can of worms that doesn't belong to that reply. Let's say while I understand some of their reservations, these reservation doesn't change that they're greedy and selfish (beyond acceptable limits).
Hardware isn't that hard to copy paste really, to make it hard you need to use really expensive processes (extreme uv etc), but otherwise, mostly you can pretty much take a picture. (very grossly speaking here, but just saying, the software is definitely a critical part)
>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.
Debian doesn't advertise itself as 100% open source, either.
Main and Contrib has to obey DFSG guidelines, and there's an optional non-free repository which you can enable if you prefer.
Firmware is a gnarly can of worms though, and while I prefer 100% free firmware myself, companies are not brave enough to open that part of their ecosystem, yet, if ever.
Companies typically move more and more functionality to closed firmware, so they can ”open source” a thin wrapper, like a driver, that is often completely useless, and often encumbered with cryptography restrictions, strict trademarks and software patents anyway.
NVIDIA does exactly what you said. Move everything to firmware and closed GL libraries, and open source a kernel module to facilitate communication. They even created different firmware versions to prevent open source drivers to use the whole card.
AMD did the inverse: They re-implemented a fully open driver from scratch, opened up the specs, made every part which they can make (legally) accessible, accessible, open sourced ROCm and send in packages to major distributions' (main / open source) repositories. Their firmware is closed source, but it's obtainable and doesn't require signatures to enable the card. They even clashed with HDMI forums to make a libre implementation of v2.1, but the forum basically threatened them.
Intel's graphics drivers are basically the same with AMD.
Broadcom / Intel / Realtek NICs work without their respective firmware blobs, yet their offloading capabilities are disabled. Either way, the drivers are completely open source and in the kernel mainline.
Same for most sound cards sans Creative Labs. I want to hit them with a foam cluebat so bad.
Logitech's all stuff works with open drivers. They are the primary contributor to V4L standard, standardize their webcam interfaces and provide drivers or help.
> More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future.
That sounds ominous.
I can understand not being able to remove non-free dependencies that were used previously, but that sounds like they intend to create new non-free components.
