hi, phil here — post on adafruit here:
<a href="https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...</a><p>i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).<p>sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.<p>instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.<p>so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.<p>as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”<p>this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.<p>sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.<p>ask away!
If it means anything, the first thought I had reading this post was "I wonder how SparkFun is exaggerating or misrepresenting this situation, because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here."
> because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here.<p>I've been hearing about this drama through a group chat for a long time. To be honest, neither side looks good in this one. Both companies have behaved disappointingly at different times for different reasons. I'm not doing this is an arbitrary "both sides" dismissal. There have been actions from both companies that would have been unacceptable in isolation.<p>The OSHW world revolves a lot around conferences, social media, and IRC/Matrix/Discord servers. Not coincidentally, this feels a lot like old IRC and forum drama of years past.
Both companies are pretty small and presumably exist because their owners are passionate about hobby electronics. Honestly, I'd rather have companies like that ran by (flawed) humans than by PR robots.<p>If they want to air their dirty laundry in public, I'm happy to grab popcorn and watch. I'm honestly shocked by the number of folks on this thread who don't know the specifics, and most probably never even bought anything from Sparkfun or Adafruit, but still want to condemn one of the companies in the strongest possible terms...
Thanks for the message. Which IRC channel should I join?
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/page-2#post-364465" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a>
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants.<p>> we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order<p>> that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_<p>You don't <i>tell</i> or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.<p>Request a meeting. Send a calm, collected, professional email to a decision-maker and be sure it's well sourced and factual. Keep things in private.<p>If the other party decides not to take action, then make a decision if you want to continue doing business with them. Do not keep pressuring them for the outcome <i>you</i> want, do not escalate the situation, and certainly don't drag the dirty laundry out into the public.<p>Like, what good did Adafruit actually think was going to come from getting into a fight with the founder of Sparkfun? 50 lashings with a wet noodle?<p>Whatever Sparkfun allegedly did to cause this, Adafruit looks pretty poor in this light. I've been a long time customer of both Adafruit and Sparkfun, and will continue to be - but this is some rookie, amateur, hot-headed behavior from Adafruit.
They seem to have reported it in private and were then banned and publicly accused of Code of Conduct violations in retaliation. Going public with everything would seem to be the reasonable response.
Sure, but they did so by going to the Teensy forum, which is not a SparkFun site, and really made a stink. If going public is reasonable, they did it in the least reasonable way.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
They requested comments from the public about the product, only mentioning that the fact that they weren’t allowed to purchase more from Sparkfun [0]. Sparkfun then jumped into the discussion with accusations of a Code of Conduct violation, and only then did they respond publicly. Sparkfun made it public first in that 3rd party forum.<p>[0] <a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a>
after a decade of dealing with the founder's bullying, i had enough, looking back almost every year there was something. we did handle things privately until it was clear nothing was going to change, the only real change is we cannot buy teensy, a closed source board sparkfun exclusively makes now, maybe they (sparkfun) will stop paying the payments on something that had to agreed to, and have, we'll see.
I understand you're pretty upset with the situation, and I can't blame you.<p>But I never should be reading about any of this on public forums. It doesn't reflect well on you or Adafruit.<p>Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.<p>That's not the position you ever want to be in. Obviously.<p>If the situation was untenable, after your reasonable and private attempts, you should have decided to sever ties on your terms. The outcome would have been the same, but you'd be in control of the situation, and wouldn't be permanently leaving things in public view.<p>I'm sorry for the situation. I'm a real hot head at times, but it's something I've learned (the hard way, over and over again) that I need to control. Business is business...<p>I hope it works out for you and Adafruit.
> Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.<p>I think you've reversed cause and effect. SparkFun publicly cut off Adafruit in response to Adafruit's private contact with SparkFun. Only then did Adafruit put out a public post addressing SparkFun's vague public allegations.
there was only one product we were purchasing anything in the hundreds of units, the teensy... we had a record sales today, inquires for a new board that is open source, so i think the community and customers have made decisions too.
You must be misunderstanding: the public post you are linking is from the party you are <i>not</i> talking to, and was the first publicly published thing, which if I'm reading correctly, is <i>the</i> sin to you.
I completely disagree. Be yourself. And broadly, if you aspire to be in charge, as opposed to a forever IC, be yourself even more!<p>Adafruit makes an aesthetic experience that appeals to a niche audience. It is not an hockey stick growth company. And even those that are: Everybody makes aesthetic experiences. Nobody <i>needs</i> hobbyist microcontrollers.<p>Part of the product is being on the “right side” of Internet dramas.
If part of the product is "being on the right side of Internet drama", that kinda makes me trust them even less. A perverse incentive to get involved in stupid slapfights, escalate, and lie about it...
A private email isn't internet drama: you commenting on a disagreement you are not involved in, on the internet, is internet drama.<p>The person you are commenting on <i>privately</i> communicated, the public link you are reading is the <i>other</i> party.
<i>You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.</i><p>Joyent's CEO once said he would have sacked another companies employee.
I see: when you’re working with another company and someone’s a dick, you can’t mention it and give constructive suggestions on how to fix it, because then the suggestions are transmutated into an order. That means you are telling a company what it <i>has</i> to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing.
> it has to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing<p>Imo that “worse than the bad thing” evaluation is highly subjective. Nevertheless, I have to say I agree with the poster who recommends you cut ties on your own terms.
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.<p>Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.<p>If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.<p>Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
The fact that the Adafruit team continued that thread unabashedly after Paul Stoffregen's first reply is an awful look in my opinion. Doesn't seem like anyone here is behaving like adults.<p>Edit: I should clarify - Paul seems very much like a mature adult in all of this.
still vague as hell lol
My first thought was the same. I used to like Sparkfun but then they closed the source of some of their projects (while often "forgetting" to update their website to reflect that). I was concerned when I saw the headline but just assumed that Sparkfun was probably in the wrong even before I saw the comments.
Same. I was afraid that there was some bad egg that managed to get into Adafruit, or maybe someone was having a real bad day. You never know what kind of person someone is off camera, but Adafruit as a company has always managed to give off the most wholesome vibes.<p>I'll be interested to see how this unfolds. I have little skin in the game being mostly upstream of the supply chain, but I've had reason to purchase from both companies, and hope this doesn't blow up into a huge thing.
That was my first thought as well, especially given the accusation of code of conduct violation. Not that I think that Adafruit is perfect no matter what, but I would have been shocked if this turned out to be true as stated.
Yeah just to add to this pile, I've always found Adafruit to be one of the most reasonable companies in the space. I've been buying their products for a decade.
Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board?<p>In my book, what makes a Teensy a Teensy is 1) hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks and 2) software compatibility with Paul Stoffregen's well documented Teensyduino libraries. I would not buy something else if I needed these features.<p>Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?<p>[0] <a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.pjrc.com/store/ic_mkl02_t4.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pjrc.com/store/ic_mkl02_t4.html</a>
hi, great question. we have to start with something and while the RP2350 is not going to beat a 600mhz m7 it is much less expensive, fast to get, has lots of nifty support libraries available, and will definitely do better than the teensy 3.2 which many folks loved so much (and was discontinued during the chip shortage). this is also a great time to add things that we always wanted in the teensy: SWD debug, built in 8 MB storage, lipoly battery charging, open source bootloader, open hardware design. stuff like CAN is supported via PIO (<a href="https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040</a>), as is USB host on any two adjacent pins. M33 has FPU, and the dormant/RTC mode for the RP2350 is 10uA (see <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/whats-inside-the-raspberry-pi-pico-2s-rp2350" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/...</a>). other 'teensiriffic' things like NeoPixel DMA support is well supported by PIO on the RP2350. as well as I2S audio.<p>as for the bootloader chip: we don't want to trade one closed-single-source component for another. if we're going to make something it should be fully open source as much as we can!<p>finally, for teensyduino libraries that you love: there's no reason they cant be ported (we did an audio port for the samd51) - which specific library are you referring to?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.<p>I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.<p>Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
> I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do).<p>Why is it a fair thing to do?
It supports the developer by preventing blatant ripoffs of the Teensy.<p>Paul is one guy, and has put in a ton of effort writing high quality libraries for it. Most or all of them are open source. The main MCU is a commodity item. Only the bootloader chip is closed source.<p>If you want to rip off the Teensy, you can use the same MCU but you'll need to come up with your own bootloading process (Adafruit could do this if they wanted to). It wouldn't be that difficult but is enough of a barrier to stop casual cloning. Seeing as how Amazon and Aliexpress are filled with cheap Arduino clones but not Teensys, it seems to have gone well so far. Nobody wants to be undercut so easily by someone who has no intention of contributing back.
> Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.<p>If I want that much performance, maybe I should think about a Pocketbeagle 2. And almost every embedded MCU these days is sprouting an on-chip "AI" extension ;).
I have projects that can equally use either a Teensy or a few different Feather boards, and frankly the Feather boards are always the prefferred option beacause:<p>* assymetrical footprint - the assymmetrical dip footprint means the board has polarity protection. I have hat/receiver boards with zig-zag stagger dip rows that work as free componentless sockets to receive a feather board with pins soldered. The Feather versions are far more convenient and safe since they can't be plugged in any way but the correct way.<p>* The Feather standard being a standard - ecosystem of compatible boards with compatible footprint & pinout at least for main functions.<p>* lipo charging circuit and jst plug, the automatic ups functionality, usb charging, removable/replaceable via standard plug<p>* off-board power on/off - I very much make use of the trick Feather has where a hat can turn the mcu board on/off without being the source of power to the mcu board.<p>* Perhaps a small detail but Feathers with sd card slots have the card sense pin wired up to a gpio pin while the teensy's do not. On Feather I can have a hardware interrupt fire when a card is inserted or ejected, and I can't do that on Teensy.<p>* keeping all parts on the top surface - there are other mcu dev boards with some similar functions but they are less convenient to use as a module in a project since they may have buttons, jst plug, sd card slot, or other stuff on both sides of the board, which makes them inaccessible when mounted onto some other pcb.<p>Teensy has a few points in their favor too but I really value these facets of most Feather boards.
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.<p>Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.<p>Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.<p>Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
I've been interested to hear more about use cases for these "hybrid" MCUs, can you share a bit about why you chose that over something like a Cortex-A running linux, or an SoC with -A and -M cores?
It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...<p>Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.<p>If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.
Ah interesting! I work on (very expensive) SDRs and we make pretty heavy use of Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale SoCs. They combine Cortex-A, Cortex-R, and FPGA fabric all in one package, with some fancy interconnects. So you can handle the hard realtime stuff on an RTOS or in the FPGA, then send the data over to the application processor with a hard float ALU to crunch some numbers (or build some kind of dsp IP into the FPGA, idk much about that side of it).<p>I've also seen some cool stuff with the BeagleBone products, which have a few TI custom architecture DSPs and "realtime units" which you can communicate with via Linux.<p>But yeah, I can certainly see how just doing it all on a super fast MCU could be easier and cheaper without the backing of commercial enterprises.<p>I've always thought it would be cool to design a "poor man's zynq" hat for a SBC. Stick a RP3050 and a Lattice FPGA on there and set up some SPI / UART connections.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.<p>either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
Mostly I'm just leery of software defined peripherals being at the mercy of whatever community springs up around them, nothing specific. In terms of a Metro then yeah, something to slot in where the Due was absolutely with high speed USB, 10/100 ethernet, CAN FD, and all that jazz that wouldn't work on a $10 board. A SAMV70 successor to the Due?<p>NXP just seems antithetical to an open platform. Then again Arduino went with Renesas, and they're… not great.<p>Otherwise it's the openness that would pique my interest. SWD headers, yes 100%. But also the documentation. No half-assed SVDs, buggy closed source flash algorithms (Microchip), wholly undocumented peripherals (looking at you Renesas), stuff like that.
There is a place for a cheaper 5v tolerant microcontroller, but that’s more of a commodity space and probably not worth competing in for most.
It looks like it's just a set of bullet points on a forum thread, not anything like a final design, so go post that comment there.
> hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks<p>FWIW, those are all NXP-provided features on the chip, not something Sparkfun has any particular connection with. There are other iMX devices on the market, just not in this form factor. And there are other vendors with SoCs offering similar performance.<p>Really one of the biggest problems in this market is that everyone is putting the abstractions in the wrong place. We've all collectively decided that this stuff is scary and we need comforting IDEs and hardware uniformity to deal with it.<p>But... portable software and frameworks are hardly new ideas. Come over to Zephyr and see all the stuff you can run on boards from basically everyone, including NXP.<p>There's a lot more great hardware for your project than just Teensy, so stop locking yourself in.
Oh boy, just what we need. Drama between open hardware vendors. Neither of these responses feels like the complete story to me. I hope there's a path forward to heal this rift in one way or another. Both SparkFun and Adafruit are doing amazing things for the community and I would love to see both continue to thrive.
Note that Sparkfun has been less and less of an "open hardware" vendor, as they've dropped the open aspect on some of their most popular projects.
Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era
we are sticking with open source, arduino has moved away from that and sparkfun has an open-source certification revoked due to not being open source.
What's the drama with Pebble? I thought everything was rosy since the reboot?
There was conflict between the new (old) hardware manufacturer Core Devices, and the Rebble community that's maintained the app store and software for the original Pebbles. I think they've worked it out, but it got ugly for a bit.
Do you have a response/explanation for the two specific accusations about forwarding inappropriate emails to sparkfun employees, and involving a customer with something?<p>Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.
>so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters..<p>one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...<p>so that corporation decides to be the better person, declare the opponent as weirdos, then proceed to point fingers at individuals instead for collective action from the public.<p>nice look, both groups.
Have you also been embargoed from buying shift keys?
I laughed way too hard at this. Also, I can't even read some of these statements with a straight face because all the project and company names sound completely ridiculous when placed in serious sentences, it's like reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters.
I needed a good laugh today and "reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters" gave me it, so: thanks!
Levar Burton did get into some hot water over the Reading Rainbow app.
Hah, really? He's a treasure, met him a few times at poetry readings and such. A quick search isn't bringing anything up but google has been failing me a lot lately. Or I'm failing at google a lot lately.
Or Google is failing you lately. Seems like it's not a recent event, which Google is also REALLY bad at these days.<p><a href="https://current.org/2016/03/wned-and-rrkidz-trade-lawsuits-over-reading-rainbow-licensing/" rel="nofollow">https://current.org/2016/03/wned-and-rrkidz-trade-lawsuits-o...</a>
speech to text, with a newborn, replying to these and feeding her. i cannot purchase shift keys if they are on sparkfun, yes.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
The problem is not STT or feeding the baby. All his emails lack capitalization. E.g: <a href="https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505c99" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505...</a>
> I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying<p>Don't worry, he always writes like this.
Adafruit is maybe an all time amazing success story built on giving more of a shit than anyone else. There is a direct through line from reading MAKE in high school through programming the 8 LED POV thing through the rest of my career. Limor doesn't answer a forum question on a Sunday morning in like 2008 and I don't make my mortgage payment this month and my son gets store brand formula. I wish you every success professionally and in this new chapter with your tiny miracle, and I hope for an amicable resolution to this whole Sparkfun thing.
Congratulations! (assuming you're the parent)
Perhaps a foot pedal? Maybe Adafruit could make one.
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Let me inform you (and anyone else for that matter) that one observer has observed 2 samples of writing today, yours and his, and has formed 2 impressions of the writers, and that yours is not the more favorable. Do with this information what you will.
valuing style over substance is folly.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
years and years and years of ptorrone's posts aren't capitalized, though. it's not like they suddenly decided today, for the purposes of this post, to change their writing style.<p>in any case, i prefer to decide whether someone has the "emotional maturity of a child" based on <i>what</i> they say, not whether they push their shift key.
It's rarely the mature who talk about maturity.
Perhaps but in this case the style does make it harder to read the substance.
*poorly written prose
What?<p>Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.<p>Sorry, from a bystander this looks like a straight-up lie, and why lie about such a small thing? It brings into question the truth of your other statements. Just say you like the style if that's the truth.
some are already words/abbreivations that are in my word list and some are me typing over later when i can, and some is a cut/paste if limor has something for me to add or does an edit as she looks at things. you can see my writings on the adafruit blog have caps, commenting on forums or hackersnews quickly, there will be some things someone does not like. we were at the doc with our 2 month old during this ... <a href="https://x.com/ptorrone/status/2011509017814659095" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ptorrone/status/2011509017814659095</a>
Typing in all lowercase makes you look more vulnerable, it's a pretty common rhetorical tactic in PR.
I had never noticed this before. Can you point at any examples?<p>I have long noticed high profile people going to court with some kind of cast on, though.
Agree, it makes it seem like the individual is "one of us" and that what they're saying is a little more raw/genuine.<p>"They're being mean to me." vs "theyre being mean to me".
Uh, no, it makes you look careless and unprofessional.
some of us are anti-capitalist
I was going to ask more about your philosophy, but after collapsing all of the other replies, I got to see what you were replying to.<p>I fear the page formatting caused an entirely respectable joke to be lost to many people
This whole thread is utterly ridiculous. I can't take anyone seriously who is sitting here saying they can't take someone else seriously over this, or even saying anything at all about it as though it were the tiniest bit significant.<p>It's like Vance on Zelensky's clothes. Exhibiting high ignorance and triviality while in the very act of presuming to accuse someone else of being unserious.
I have no idea what any of this thread is about, but I'm sure the thing that I'm going to remember next time I need to buy something from one of these two is that one of them can be bothered to use capital letters, so I'll use them.
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.<p>This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.<p>There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.
> We are now working on an open-source, Teensy-compatible board.<p>Yeah, right; the PCB art work looks in rather an advanced state of completion that has been in the works for a while due to the proverbial writing being on the wall.<p>More like, we have now given a brighter green light to our ongoing in-house project to eliminate the supply risk coming from Sparkfun, now that the shit has hit the fan ...
Appreciate the transparency! The one thing that doesn't quite add up for me is SparkFun accusing you of "involving a SparkFun customer" in the dispute. Can you comment on what that might be referring to?
probably mentioning on PJRC's forum they're making their own teensy compatible because sparkfun(Under contract by PJRC as the exclusive teensy manufacturer) cut them off.<p><a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/#post-364425" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a>
This needs a response, and my opinion will certainly be up in the air until I hear an explanation (or lack thereof) from AdaFruit.
Phil, thanks for hopping into this thread because I have an important question - is your shift key broken? If so, how has that affected your ability to code and use CAD programs?
Glad to hear that there will by an open source option. This honestly makes the Teensy/Freensy an option for me where before it wasn't.<p>Is there any thought to expanding the Freensy lineup beyond a pure clone?
Wouldn't be the first time CoC was used as a lame attempt to harm open source.<p>Thanks for speaking up.
I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.<p>"Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole to such an extent it was driving other people away or getting us into legal trouble", with the manner of assholery defined in the CoC.
9/10 times it is nothing sinister.<p>Of course right now we just don't know what happened.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
In this case, given the topic of this thread is targeted harassment in response to public social media criticism, I think it's understandable that some folks might like to participate anonymously to avoid becoming a future target.
> "Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole [...]"<p>Not even that, since so many CoCs are vague enough that someone unprincipled wielding them could be using them for petty interpersonal disputes. Unless I already have reason to trust the accuser, when I see "CoC violation" it tells me there's drama but it doesn't tell me who the asshole is.
> I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.<p>If you look at how I worded my comment, you'll see I didn't jump to any conclusion. Only you have, apparently.<p>(edit: Also unsurprising to see your account is two days old)
Are you HR or something?
Nah but I recognize that HR, unfortunately, has to exist for larger organizations.<p>Unless you have an infinitely wise and patient dictator who can just say "you're an asshole, you go" and always make the right call or something.
Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Overall I wish we lived in a world where they are not needed. But in every community, some people are assholes so they are often needed.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings.
I've been part of a lot of communities and never have I felt that a CoC was missing or needed. CoCs didn't come because they were needed but because of a social justice fad. Have a look at the Tim Peters incident with the Python community. The decision to suspend him, a core maintainer (he wrote the Zen of Python), was justified by made-up absurd alleged CoC violations. Without a CoC they couldn't have suspended him as easily without totally losing their face.
> Communities were doing just fine without a CoC<p>I mean kinda, but also not. CoCs just codify what the moderators think.<p>Even Hacker news has a CoC: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a> its just called a guide.<p>A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it"<p>A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.<p>It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.<p>In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell.<p>CoCs are a tool, that can sometimes help.
I perceive "guidelines" or "rules" having a very different connotation compared to a "code of conduct."<p>See for, example, the SQLite team adopting the Rule of St. Benedict as their "Code of Conduct," getting criticized for it, and changing it to a "Code of Ethics" in accordance with the Rule about seeking accommodation with your adversaries.
I would say incorrect. All that is true is that something is needed, but there is nothing about the problem that requires that particular poor framework for dealing with it.
It just means you get different kinds of assholes who are better at navigating around the CoC or even weaponizing it.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
Mate, thats just rules. rules you don't agree with.
I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”.
And "social justice" is often a weapon of capital interests in disguise.
There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation.<p>No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls.<p>I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project.<p>Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another.
What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors? It seems like there are really three different markets and it sucks because crossing “lanes” is really annoying. I like how you all made the qwik connectors “just work”, but now that I’m trying more industrial stuff I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get my 24v world to play nicely with the 3.3v world but of course my 24v world only wants to do SPI over 5v.<p>Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.
Those levels are based on the electronics themselves. Earlier circuits used TTL which needed higher voltages to signify a "High". Newer CMOS based electronics need less voltage.<p>Lower voltages help with power savings. Higher voltages can and do work better in high power, high noise environments though! 24V as you see is still very popular and useful inany applications.
great question! so historically microcontrollers (and sensors) were 5V 'CMOS' power and logic. this was way better than the up-to-12V for TTL logic but over time the desire for higher clock speeds / faster IO / lower power means the voltage needs to drop (since power = current * voltage lower voltage is lower power) the next voltage standard became 3.3V. these days, even 3.3V is a 'bit high' and we're seeing lots of device that are 1.8V or 1.65V or even 1.2V max (yeek!) one thing we do for all of our sensor breakouts is add level shifting up/down as necessary so they work with EITHER 5V older boards (yay no need to throw them out!) or with the newer 3.3V boards (woo forward compatibility) level shifting and regulation also reduces the risk of damage from over/under volting or plugging stuff in backwards. this is documented here: <a href="https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/stemma-qt-comparison" rel="nofollow">https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/st...</a><p>maybe someone from sparkfun could post advice for you here too...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!<p>Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
> What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors?<p>Historical garbage and different manufacturing technologies. Be happy if you can get away with only 5V and 3V3 rails in your project. 24V is usually to interface with industrial sensors. And sometimes you see 12V as well, for stuff that's RS232 based.<p>And on top of that you got a fifth standard, 4..20 mA current loops. That one is used for long range transmission of analog values of a single sensor per wire pair, with 4-20 mA being seen as the value (4 mA = 0%, 20 mA = 100%), and anything less being seen as a cable break, anything higher as a short circuit somewhere.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
don't forget 0-10v and 2-10v analog signals.
Never used 2-10V but I learned about 0-10V when someone approached me to design a device to input 0-10V position signal and output two phase-shifted sinusoids to retrofit to a controller that only took resolver inputs. We shipped a couple dozen of them to repair broken machine tools. Fun project, but not going to get rich from it!<p>I'm guessing that the 2-10V is to detect line break conditions?
Ah yes, I was wondering why my ClearCore supported that, seemed oddly specific!
No questions. Just move on. Engaging in public spectacle isn't a good look for anyone.
That's normally good advice, but this is a small enough niche that trust-in-brand matters a great deal. Right now AdaFruit is looking like the villain here. I think a little more transparency from them is a very good thing if they don't want to suffer massive brand damage.<p>Definitely avoid ad hominems, and focus purely on facts. Provide what information/evidence you can without violating agreements, but only if it's relevant to the situation and includes as much context as possible.
No in this case addressing the accusation is necessary.<p>I think what's currently been said is sufficient. You need to make a grown up version of the statement "None of that is true", but yes probably best to leave it at that.<p>Honestly, this being Adafruit, my default assumption is to believe them. Especially with this super vague "please read between the lines because if I actually say something false it'll be libel" accusation.
Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics?<p>I know SparkFun recently took over Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon's Teensy production (I reached out at the time and Paul said it was cool).<p>I'm guessing Adafruit got a special deal in purchasing Teensy's from SparkFun but because of an allegation made by you against Nate, they are responding by dropping your entire product line?<p>Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.
I have feeling it will only hurt PJRC in the end for trusting sparkfun to sell and manage the teensy "brand"
I am completely out of loop here. I think I may have heard about adafruit once.<p>Your comment seemed the most information to me (and thank you for that) but can you please sum up the whole controversy from what allegations were made and everything because I was sensing that adafruit was in the right earlier but (now I am not?)<p>I feel like I would benefit a lot if you can tell me the whole controversy if possible. Thanks in advance!
I thought the Teensys were made by PJRC. and they seem to list a number of US distributors on their website still. (including adafruit)
I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?<p>I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.
Documentation yes, but also Adafruit has very active support forums where customers can ask questions which get answered either by the community, or Adafruit employees, or both.
Links to "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment"?
Post the emails
This post is not a good look. You come off as quite snide. In particular, things like "Sparkfun will not?", calling a CoC concern a weirdo behavior, responding to harassment allegations by saying the did it first.<p>This seems very much like two businesses experiencing friction and separating, which happens all the time. You coming in and framing the flames makes doesn't scan particularly positively to me.
What are the impacts if any to the Stemma QT and Quiic ecosystems?
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Looks like you guys are handling it right from a consumer standpoint. Thanks for letting us know and for not playing the fingerpointing game in public. Looks like you're not playing at all and just moving on. Nice.
The post you are replying to literally is playing the finger pointing game. They level accusations right back at spark fun.<p>I have zero skin in this game, and personally think the right move is for Adafruit to simply say, "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck" and move on, but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
> "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck"<p>This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.<p>> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.<p>SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:<p>- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?<p>- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?<p>- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?<p>- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?<p>[1] <a href="https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026" rel="nofollow">https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026</a><p>[2] <a href="https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b49ae" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b58a7" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220" rel="nofollow">https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220</a>
I don’t know what’s going on here but it is super funny to link to [2] and only quote “hi jerks”<p>> nick has been telling people about the grand old time you two had at limor’s expense, my expense, and others. he says you sat around making memes about us, registering domains, the whole thing.<p>> you removed [limor’s] name on code. you scraped our site until it crashed and then emailed to get unblocked so your team could keep using our guides. you squatted on the adafruit name for usb stuff. that’s just a sample of the greatest hits. can you "compete" without doing this? did it even work?
Yes, the broader context of that email chain is a broad unloading of a 'greatest hits' of a decade of grievances against SparkFun (the meme site mentioned was made in 2017, by an employee who no longer works there).<p>I quoted the lines that seemed to most obviously tip that particular email exchange beyond a measured harassment report (as originally implied), crossing the line into what could be reasonably considered 'unappropriately aggressive behavior' (to quote the SparkFun CoC).<p>I would agree that the ex-employee's 'Sincerely, Fuck Off' was similarly aggressive, but less relevant since he's no longer an employee anyway, and it seemed pretty clear that he was the one being subject to targeted harassment in this instance (having accusations being forwarded to his partner's employer) rather than the other way around.
Not to split hairs here but it doesn’t look like he said it was a <i>measured</i> harassment report. Having worked customer service and HR, it’s somewhat common for people reporting harassment to be irate or even downright rude, especially when they feel that they’re being ignored.<p>The idea that calling someone a jerk is grounds for a company to ignore a serious complaint is, paradoxically, what some people describe as their reason for being rude.<p>Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious
> it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report.<p>If splitting hairs, he originally framed the response as 'kill the messenger', implying there was no other reason for them be offended by it, misleading at least.<p>> Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious<p>I agree, in isolation- it seems reasonable to end a business relationship with any rude or hostile partner regardless, but hiding such a decision behind a CoC rationale <i>just</i> for being called jerks would indeed border on 'hilarious'.<p>In this case, the claim is that the note was also sent to the ex-employee's partner's current employer, which enters less-hilarious territory towards borderline harassment, not a private HR complaint but public defamation.<p>Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.
These are uncorroborated, unevidenced accusations, which is probably why they went unquoted
user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...<p>the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior. i contacted them privately using an email address they themselves used on the site they used, specifically to ask for a stop to the pile-on and to see whether there was a constructive way to resolve their grievance. their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.<p>with respect to sparkfun, yes, i sent a direct email to the founder, and ceo (and contacts i have there) calling out what i believe is a long-standing bully culture tolerated at the top. calling a company out for behavior is not harassment, even when the language is blunt. during this same period, fake accounts using my handle appeared and mass-reporting was clearly underway. my real account was likely caught up in that. retroactively attributing moderation actions for saying their first name on their email is inaccurate.<p>the various bans you cite did not occur after some calm, independent review of facts. they occurred in the middle of coordinated reporting, they said so.<p>as for etsy, i asked a seller who was publicly accusing me of “doxxing” a question: would placing an order would expose my personal information? that was it, there was a sticker in my cart already, i know this maker's work. etsy declined to take action that i know of, i just an etsy order, no ban (i did not buy the stickers). recharacterizing that as harassment is another example of inflation through repetition.<p>what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade. i am not doing that anymore. drawing a line cost us purchasing a closed source board that only sparkfun makes, so we're doing an open source version.
> user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...<p>Yes, indeed, given the claims of targeted harassment of random participants this thread is dealing with, I preferred to avoid being personally targeted next just for being another random participant. Others will have to trust that I'm not previously involved, just a HN observer trying to make sense of the details of this dispute now that it spilled over here.<p>> their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.<p>Maybe I missed something, but this wasn't a simple reply to a private email as you seem to imply- it was a public social media post linking their name to their account (which they had specifically avoided for privacy purposes), not edited/removed after it was made clear that the exposure of that information was harmful to them, and the misgendering/dead-naming was repeated in subsequent communications after it was made clear that this behavior was unwanted. Is any of that inaccurate?<p>> what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade.<p>Not having been involved at all, I know nothing about the 'long, documented history' of grievances between you all, but if there are missing details that would help further clarify what the dispute here is <i>really</i> about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.
> <i>the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior.</i><p>Their response when you made this claim in November was “what communities?????”. Are you perhaps mixing them up with someone else? (Source: <a href="https://digipres.club/@discatte/115595517911363679" rel="nofollow">https://digipres.club/@discatte/115595517911363679</a>.)
Why do I need to prove I'm human to read your blog?
Can't speak specifically for this site, but these days many prove-you're-human tests have been added because of overzealous AI scraping eating server resources unnecessarily and to an unreasonable and excessive degree.
Because AI scraping is everywhere and flooding sites with useless traffic. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best people can do atm
"It's not ideal" is an understatement, I have to do stupid captchas for about half my Google searches.
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
Because of enshitification of the internet you now need to solve puzzles before you can access websites. Welcome to 2026.
I'm not sure I can trust someone who seems completely oblivious to capital letters.
Probably the key to eventual clarity is at PJRC's forum. PJRC makes Teensy. Imho it's a great product, and the owner, Paul Stoffregen, a great engineer and person from my experience using their products.<p><a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a><p>My summary:<p>1. SparkFun and Adafruit are in conflict
2. SparkFun manufactures Teensy under license from PJRC
3. SparkFun cuts off Adafruit as a reseller
4. Adafruit can no longer sell Teensy
5. Adafruit posts on PJRC forum announcing an open-source Teensy competitor
6. Paul posts that it's outrageous in terms of etiquette that they're announcing a competitor on his forum. Adafruit's own forum only allows discussion of Adafruit products.<p>He's allowing it despite mixed feelings.
To publish such a vague statement is an obvious invitation for speculation. It seems like rather questionable behaviour itself from spatkfun.<p>The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.
While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.<p>Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.<p>While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.<p>Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.
What would you have them publish instead? Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.
> What would you have them publish instead?<p>The statement that is published places blame, if not accusations of criminal behaviour, on their business partner.<p>IOW, they already overshared with the intent of damaging the reputation of their business partner.<p>In my mind, they are already behind; had they released the standard business line "Our relationship with $X has come to an end; we apologise for any inconvenience caused" I wouldn't be so quick to judge them.<p>But, now I *am judging them, because they clearly felt personally aggrieved by what happened, enough to imply the worst without actually coming out and saying what happened.
I would rather they published nothing. There is no need to make any of this public. Just stop selling Adafruit products and stop selling to Adafruit. If anyone asks, then you can say "we don't do business with them any longer". The public doesn't need the rationale.<p>That's it. Everything else is dragging the community/customers into a fight that they didn't ask for.
> What would you have them publish instead?<p>Is there any duty to publish anything? They could release nothing, or nothing with any details, if they have some obligation.
Something more concrete like "on Tuesday at 9pm an adafruit employee sent an aggressive email which violated our COC by calling one of our employees a 'stupid fuckface'".<p>I don't think that level of detail would be a privacy violation legally and imo not morally either
Nothing, you either want to talk about a problem or not. Throwing vague, empty claims is just a cheap attack on other's company public image
Nothing. They could just cut ties and be done with it.
If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish <i>absolutely nothing</i>. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.
It seems like releasing more would have probably broken the exact same rules they are claiming AdaFruit broke.
if they didn't want to say more, they should have said less.<p>the way that normal serious businesses handle situations like this is to simply stop carrying the product, instead of publishing vague, unverifiable accusations of wrongdoing. and then if somebody notices and asks questions, you'd give a statement like "unfortunately we could not come to an agreement to continue our relationship with this vendor, but we're happy to be able to continue offering a number of other comprable products".
> Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.<p>I agree in principle, but is there an actual <i>right</i> to privacy in this instance?<p>I'm asking this in the legal sense, not a moral sense.
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
Don’t attention whore on the internet if you want privacy.
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Yes. They really should have just put a notice up that they're no longer distributing AdaFruit products and direct people to Adafruit website.
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I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but <a href="https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707" rel="nofollow">https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707</a> sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.
This adds some more context I guess <a href="https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877" rel="nofollow">https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877</a><p>Honestly the whole thing seems like everyone overreacting on both sides. Accusing someone is "doxing" because they used your first name?
The collections of threads, statements, and accusations on both sides are some of the most unhinged things I have seen in a while, and I don't think any of this helps anyone. :')
I believe they are claiming doxing based on connecting an email to a social media account.
I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.<p>Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.<p>Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.
Buried in there is the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing the Adafruit guy.<p>Kind of shitty to play the victim at that point.
Is it? It was (as far we know) a mild shitpost of a public figure like from a decade ago. Photoshopping someones head over the Pepe Silva meme is not nice, but its hardly harassment. To me the "worst" thing was registering the domain, which he gave to Torrone and apologized quite well in my opinion <a href="https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505c99" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505...</a>.<p>Sure, if this was a pattern of behavior it would be ridiculous to play the victim, but there isn't as far we know. 9 years later, Torrone starts Mullenweg-posting because some random criticized him for AI stuff. He posts their private email taken from a receipt and when blocked he continues with sock-puppets. Sparkfun guy gives a (quite measured) opinion colored by the fact that Torrone is still is doing this shit to random people. Torreone acusses the Sparkfun guy of being his personal Moriarty.<p>The most unhinged (and cowardly) thing to me is bringing up his partner and his newborn at every turn in his Twitter shitflinging, when any "slights" just seem only directed at him.<p>(Dude, if you are reading this just log off, this might literally just sleep deprivation. Take focus on caring of your child instead of fighting on the internet)
correct "the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing"
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
Reading this, it looks like everyone needs a break.
This whole thing just seems like two terrible people being terrible to each other and both vying for sympathy to be the less terrible person in this.
That looks like the usual social media victim style posting.
I read a bunch of the relevant social media posts and emails and concluded that all parties are acting deeply childishly.<p>Nate shouldn’t have made a website with a domain name with Phil’s name and photoshopped meme, and brought it back up on social media years later.<p>Phil shouldn’t have been so aggressive in emailing Nate’s and his wife’s employers.<p>Sparkfun shouldn’t have overreacted by cutting off ties with Adafruit.
This makes me think of Park Tools. Park sells bicycle tools. They design and produce an amazing breadth of products. They also produce an incredibly valuable library of instructional content about how to use these tools. Calvin Jones, their director of education, just announced his retirement after 28 years.<p>Anyway, they just teach you how to do the thing. They somehow haven't gotten into internet squabbles with their suppliers or retailers. I would just call it professional.
Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.<p>If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”
Are you one of those pro-skub hooligans?<p><a href="https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/" rel="nofollow">https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/</a>
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.<p>The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
The URL for this page is very generic and bound to become a 404 page. Thinking about URLs is important to prevent link rot.
Agreed. Because of this (and regardless), archive everything:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.sparkfun.com/official-response" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.spark...</a>
Sparkfun redid their site a couple years ago and nuked the links to all product pages of retired products too. A shame. I found someone's archive of the old site at one point, but I've since misplaced it.
The URL for this page is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. I don't expect it will survive the week.
Almost like it's by design.
Is "by design" supposed to imply a negative scheming aspect, or am I reading too much into your comment? This page won't really be relevant to anything after a couple months, so if the link breaks I don't think there's a big problem.
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Such drama. I’m going back to BX-24s and dusting off the 1st edition Igoe book.
I can't comment on this matter because I don't know the details. However, based on my personal experience consuming Adafruit products and their generous open-source approach, I personally trust Adafruit very much.
Meh wish it was that simple, this paints at least part of their leadership as completely unhinged: <a href="https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877" rel="nofollow">https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877</a><p>We're only probably seeing part of the whole mess though.
Ok, so what's the drama? Because it's obvious that there was some drama there: "inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter," "Responding and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material."<p>My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
This post [0] suggests that leadership at SparkFun has been engaged in a long term harassment campaign targeting the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) using company resources, and is allegedly using their CoC as a smokescreen to cover up their own bad behavior and cast blame on the victim.<p>[0] <a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/page-2#post-364465" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a>
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if they didn't want people to speculate on the details, they could have released a more professional message instead of what they have here.<p>seriously the level of unprofessionalism at this scale of the market is shocking. you can't imagine e.g. Nvidia putting out a press release like this when they drop a vendor
Sparkfun is publicizing the enforcement of their code of conduct, making it a public issue, which is a bizarre position to take. Usually, when there are violations of things like this, you don't discuss it outside a need-to-know basis.<p>They are inviting us to ask for the tea.
given that they didn't even present actual violation in the blog it is very suspicious
I'm not involved with this specific case, but in general it's annoying when people blast some vague passive aggressive accusation publicly, but then retreat behind "it's a private matter! Respect our privacy!" when people are then naturally are interested in what happened. It's frequently cover for a weak argument.
Ignoring all this drama.<p>But I've always found Paul to be a good guy, who was helpful and honest and provided a great product. Teensy is a great platform, and it's too bad these other players will have a negative impact on it.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I checked what Teensy is up to these days and it seems that last March they decided to outsource manufacturing and direct sales to SparkFun:<p><a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufacture-teensy.76686/" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...</a>
This is all just very disappointing.<p>SparkFun filled a very important gap for me during the downfall of RadioShack. Their Free Day was a source of excitement and goodies. Around the same time they realized the legal implications of Free Day and had to cancel it, (but not because of it) I started buying from Adafruit. Since then I’ve spent many thousands on their stuff. Even when I could get it cheaper elsewhere, I was OK spending more there because of their open source work. I even made a pilgrimage to their office when it was by Ground Zero.<p>I’m not sure I can find them now, but Sparkfun’s Nate has definitely posted public comments over the years that are not friendly to Adafruit, always clearly rooted in jealousy. One that comes to mind was him telling Adafruit to stop pretending they are an underdog and stop preening that they didn’t (at that point) have millions in sales. I totally believe Adafruit’s account of what Sparkfun was doing.<p>At the same time, Phil has always rubbed me the wrong way to - too aggressive and a bit rude, even in their own forums, including where they provide customer support on orders. The threads shared of his egregious behavior do not shock me in the least.<p>I guess this is a good of a reason as any to stop supporting both. I’ll save thousands and I won’t have a continuously growing supply of components for projects I’ll never get around to.
Since any such CoC violation is very much merely a claim and not a fact, this should probably be flagged.
Feels like a breakup. Damn that sucks, can you get a mediator maybe?<p>Think of the children...
This is sad, and it doesn't reflect especially well on either party. Here's the thing, though: we evolved in a world where being expelled from the tribe was a death sentence. When people fall out, often their instinct is to try to preemptively convince everyone else that the other guy is the evil guy who should be kicked out. To convince everyone else to take a side.<p>We don't live in that world any more. You're not gonna die if you don't convince everyone that the other guy is the evil one. It's perfectly fine to decide that you just can't deal with someone else, and you can do that while accepting that you don't need everyone else to take a side or be convinced of your reasons.
Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations<p>However, I do wonder what this will mean for Adafruit product availability in Europe, as most stores I know of that sell Adafruit products here are Sparkfun distributors.
I have always supported Adafruit -- Limor's principles shine through in the products, the website, the tutorials, and in the long-term track record of standing by their products. Even when I can source things from AliExpress, I often get them from Adafruit.<p>Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?
I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.
As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:<p><pre><code> * sparkfun employee engages in some shitty behavior (maybe harassment, maybe photoshops) toward adafruit CEO
* adafruit engages sparkfun to ask them to put a stop to it
* employee leaves sparkfun
* employee continues shitty behavior
* adafruit continues to bug sparkfun about behavior
* sparkfun now has no control over employee, wants to wash their hands of it
* adafruit isn’t happy with this resolution, continues to push it, interprets inaction as tacit approval
* sparkfun cites CoC about private matters, inappropriate messages
* HN speculates :)</code></pre>
Honestly, if I received an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd probably want to wash my hands of them as well<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b49ae" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...</a>
Ah, that is pretty illuminating. Insert “adafruit employee / husband of CEO overreacts to internet squabbles and gets a little shrieky because he’s sleep deprived” in there somewhere.<p>This reminds me of the olden days of small messageboard drama. It’s a shame to see it affect a business relationship between two good companies. Maybe they’ll make up after it all cools off.
sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!<p>what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.<p>the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.<p>no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
> the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute<p>That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.<p>I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.<p>Respectfully, go take care of your family.
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
Can't help but read that and think, "And Nick thinks this email chain makes HIM look like the reasonable person?"
Are these all teenagers?
Setting aside any concept of who's "right" or "wrong", if I got an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd share it with my team, we'd all laugh a bit, take a deep breath, and find a way to de-escalate the situation.<p>Similarly if I were buying product from a supplier and they made an immature joke I found hurtful, I would probably just ignore it. If it was a recurring problem maybe I'd say "I really didn't appreciate when you <xyz>'d, can we keep this focused on business in the future?" And if that didn't solve things, I'd see if someone else could be assigned to handle the account.<p>I hope those examples don't minimize what either side is feeling, but I have to say that I don't feel I've seen anything in this thread that gets my blood pumping. Dealing with difficult or rude people is part of the job and part of life.<p>Taking things personally, especially in business, is a _very_ expensive luxury. And if that isn't convincing enough, if you still feel angry about it in a month you can usually yell at them later. But if you escalate today and feel foolish about it later, it's a lot more difficult to mend the wounds.
I think that there might be a tad of seasonal depression affecting them here. My initial reaction was basically excitement at the drama, but then I remembered that I need to take my vitamins.<p>It's sad to see two good companies go at it, but I do like the reminder that they are run by actual humans with emotions. This is why we support independent businesses instead of corporations that act like they are run by robots, and likely will be run by robots soon.
It's amusing to me that the path for this announcement is "/official-response". That's a top level path with a generic name! :-)
I actually have a small lot of the Teensy boards for a USB hardware hacking project I was running for a while. For example, I used them to emulate a USB keyboard to automatically press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Path of Exile over and over to avoid wrist strain during a time in that game where every player needed to constantly hit those keys in a loop to play at decently high levels.<p>These boards were an endless nightmare to work with. I had to cycle through many different USB controllers and it was really more like voodoo. I tried buying a few boards from different suppliers and every board had the same voodoo so I gave up and moved on.<p>I ended up getting ATtiny85 to work for what I wanted which sucked too, but at least it worked and was a fraction of the price so I could actually send them to all my friends.
Nice take on creating a thread about freensy on SparkFun's own forum!<p><a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a>
Incredible how Adafruit-sided this discussion is, having seen ptorrone serially creating alt accounts fediverse to harrass people who thought that his behavior was bad [1], going as far as to harrass people on their Etsy stores [2]. I do not expect anything he says to be truthful at all, after having seen how much abuse he spews out.<p>[1]: <a href="https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429" rel="nofollow">https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429</a>
[2]: <a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220" rel="nofollow">https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220</a>
So why haven't the emails been published? Or at the very least, summarizing the contents of the emails that specifically violate the Code of Conduct. I assume NDA reasons, but I could be wrong.
The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.<p>I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.
Tbh I think both of y'all are a boon to people mucking about with hardware and that petty arguments, MBA parasite stuff, etc is all counterproductive but fight all you like.<p>I stopped buying stuff from SF/AF ages ago as I find it all overpriced for the most part (for my use cases). But then again I've not been doing too many hardware projects recently anyway.<p>Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.
Wait is this actually an extension of the ~Nov ptorrone mastodon cryfest/freakout? I was kind of hoping that whatever manic episode was behind that had come to a close.
I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?
I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.<p>The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.<p>It's a bad look for the parties involved.
Obviously we don't know details, and Phil has made an effort at responding. However, both statements are (deliberately?) vague, and Sparkfun's CoC is laughably short. I am all for the rules being "Don't be a dick" but such vagaries can hide arbitrary decisions. All the vagaries amount to "trust me, bro" statements and when two well loved groups (AdaFruit/Sparkfun) square up in a game of trust everyone loses, at least in the short term.<p>Hopefully this gets cleared up one way or another, in a clear way that means we won't be re-litigating this for the next decade.
Wait, does this mean that all adafruit items for sale on sparkfun.com are going to be on a clearance sale?
No, it means anything they haven't shipped by the end of the day is being cancelled as an order. So I'm guessing they have very little inventory in stock or adafruit is contractually required to buy it back.
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." <a href="https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...</a>
Looks to me like they'll just dispose of the stock and not sell it.
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." <a href="https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...</a>
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"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." <a href="https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...</a>
That's the opposite, but also cool.
> We have put the remaining stock on sale.<p>Looks like the prices of Teensy boards on adafruit.com are the same as before. Maybe the statement means they will continue to sell them instead of "on sale" in the sense of applying a discount.
Wow, what a way to celebrate the birthday of a certain tech CEO by crashing-out in a similar way. This is very disappointing.
Why there is often so much drama whenever something open source or community is involved? The best we've got from the industry so far was Astronomer affair.
It's just a selection effect, the culture of openness means you are much more likely to see the drama.<p>That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?<p>Not to mention the whole "OpenAI going full corpo" drama, that was arguably a much bigger deal, something actually important instead of this small social media debacle.
Ok, ok, I exaggerated. But still, communuty is small, and the industry is big, and drama seems to be handled very differently in both
Another CoC fight.
> Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers<p>> Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter<p>Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?<p>Keep in mind adafruit and sparkfun are business competitors. Not saying either is lying but statements need to be examined carefully. For what it's worth I've purchased from both many times and was always happy customer so this is sad to see.
Adafruit's response seems to be here: <a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/post-364465" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a> (via <a href="https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...</a> )<p>> in july, we [Adafruit] told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_<p>> months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.<p>> this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
For context: This post by ptorrone suggests that leadership at Sparkfun has been engaged in a long running harassment campaign against the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) and is now attempting to weaponize their CoC to cast blame on the victim in order to deflect from their own behavior[0].<p><pre><code> for anyone still reading:
in july, we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
we do not respond to bullying by backing down. we never have. that is why we are here.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want.77584/page-2#post-364465" rel="nofollow">https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...</a>
For more context: There's also social media posts accusing ptorrone of engaging in harassment campaigns against other people.
For additional context to the context, here's Nick's account of the so-called 'long running harassment campaign' [1]: Nick made a joke site about Phil back in 2017, Phil emailed asking him to stop, Nick immediately transferred the domain to him with a heartfelt apology ("<i>man...</i> I just wanna be friends. I wanna support
you and Limor <i>and also</i> feel good about the place that I work (and kinda
live). [...] These social tools don't always translate, for that I apologize."), and they wrapped up the exchange on good terms.<p>[1] <a href="https://chaos.social/@North/115602441875664452" rel="nofollow">https://chaos.social/@North/115602441875664452</a>
C’mon people, act like adults. Your community and your customers care far less than you think.<p>If truly inexcusable behavior has ensued, there are better ways to handle it. An entire profession exists to resolve them.
Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.<p>The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.<p>I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
> Why publish this publicly?<p>I'm guessing to get ahead of any sort of speculation on why Sparkfun stops carrying their products? Perhaps also to get ahead of Adafruit publishing a similar public statement with more/conflicting details?
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here.<p>You don't actually know that for a fact.
I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.<p>This aspect is not very surprising, it is <i>usually</i> moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.
Yet another open source drama fest. Can’t be bothered. I’ll buy the best product at cheapest. I can use two stores.
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I clicked one of the top level links ITT and mostly it was triggered by two grown-ass children having a disagreement about the ethics of using gen AI and deciding to hash out that disagreement by doxing each other instead of simply talking to each other. But yes, there's also pronoun stuff in the background here, because of course there is.<p>My new rule of thumb is to steer clear of anybody with a fediverse bluesky whatever account. The whole thing is an echo chamber for amplifying insanity.
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The only thing this public dispute tells me is I should never do business with either organization. What is with childish adults dragging "drama" into the public spotlight? What is a "Code of Conduct".<p>I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.<p>Public drama is DISGUSTING!
Quite frankly, whenever I see people going the public CoC accusation route instead of talking things out man-to-man or simply parting ways politely, I see man children who never learned to resolve problems in a mature manner without running off to get Mom.
This is embarrassing and doesn’t belong in HN
Never cared much for either. Both are just insanely overpriced "maker" crap that ultimately comes from China anyway. You can get cheaper at AliExpress, LCSC etc.
Adafruit manufactures its own PCB's in New York, though the actual chips, leds, etc. come from wherever, which is often China.