i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).
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.
instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.
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.
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.”
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.
sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
ask away!
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.
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.
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...
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
> we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order
> that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
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.
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.
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 you want, do not escalate the situation, and certainly don't drag the dirty laundry out into the public.
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?
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.
Depends what they did. Let's check the forum post…
> 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.
Ok yeah if a company is sharing bigoted photoshops of my likeness, yes, I'm gonna demand that they discipline the responsible employees. Obviously.
I don't have any reference point for what "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment [meriting HR training]" constitute, but if it's anywhere near as bad as it sounds, sure, escalate the situation and air your dirty laundry in public. This is unacceptable behaviour, and apparently it went on for years. When you're being publicly harassed, you have no duty to indefinitely restrain your response to private, polite emails.
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
But I never should be reading about any of this on public forums. It doesn't reflect well on you or Adafruit.
Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.
That's not the position you ever want to be in. Obviously.
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.
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...
I hope it works out for you and Adafruit.
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.
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 needs hobbyist microcontrollers.
Part of the product is being on the “right side” of Internet dramas.
The person you are commenting on privately communicated, the public link you are reading is the other party.
Joyent's CEO once said he would have sacked another companies employee.
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.
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.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
Edit: I should clarify - Paul seems very much like a mature adult in all of this.
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.
Also all their docs man great for noobs like me starting out and libraries.
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.
Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
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!
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?
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
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.
Why is it a fair thing to do?
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.
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.
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 ;).
* 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.
* The Feather standard being a standard - ecosystem of compatible boards with compatible footprint & pinout at least for main functions.
* lipo charging circuit and jst plug, the automatic ups functionality, usb charging, removable/replaceable via standard plug
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
Teensy has a few points in their favor too but I really value these facets of most Feather boards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
These chips have perfectly-fine ROM USB bootloaders and SWD, don't ruin them by adding extra garbage.
USB HS on a board that small is a non issue: it's one measly differential pair with easy impedance requirements.
NXP just seems antithetical to an open platform. Then again Arduino went with Renesas, and they're… not great.
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.
Companies like STM, RP, and TI are at the other end. STM got super popular because they're cheap and the documentation is incredibly easy to get at. I think RP is following suit.
Renesas puts out some documentation, but it's really rough. Anything that has even a whiff of crypto is completely undocumented. They're also squatting on a few Rust crates where Espressif actually hired a Rust developer to work on their Rust HAL. The most comical thing is that while they version their reference manual they don't seem to update it and instead issue a ton of broad errata that apply to multiple manuals.
Before the acquisition Atmel's documentation was well written and organized.
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot more great hardware for your project than just Teensy, so stop locking yourself in.
Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...
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.
nice look, both groups.
https://current.org/2016/03/wned-and-rrkidz-trade-lawsuits-o...
Don't worry, he always writes like this.
As someone who hung out on IRC way back in the 1990s (and internet-knew Limor from Adafruit back before her handle was Ladyada) I associate this writing style with the culture of a lot of the hacker-related IRC channels I used to hang out in back then.
Some of the same people from that era did in fact turn out to be tech founders and maybe that's how it got carried over into the Twitter-verse, but it predates that.
Most of us would code shift when writing in other milieux, some weaned ourselves off the habit when our work started interfacing with nonreceptive readers, and a few retained the affectation to make a statement (or an anti-statement!).
It's amusing to see the style resurface in a new generation though. I guess it's no more odd than when 20 year olds unknowingly emulate the dress and mannerisms from when their parents were young. We just smile and recall the age when we thought we were being different too. :)
Not much later, I remember her hanging out in #hack in the '92-93 timeframe (first as lem0n then later as ladyada).
She was like the "kid" of the channel regulars (which is an extremely relative designation because there were a lot of teenagers just a couple years older than her).
I also remember her going to one of the 2600 meetings at the CambridgeSide Galleria that I went to with morgen and wil wheaton that must have been either in 1993 or very early 1994 (it was definitely prior to the first HOPE in 94). IIRC Limor was being chaperoned by RogueAgent and theora/Sarah Gordon.
It goes back before that. There were well known Usenet folks who adhered to the style. The 1970s-and-earlier Arpanet was before my time, but I'm sure it existed then too ;).
I was a bit post-Great Renaming into well post-Eternal September. And we may have followed different groups.
The style arises spontaneously in isolated individuals and groups of course (at least since e. e. cummings!), but it was pervasive-to-universal on IRC and MUDs.
I do wonder how it trickled into there though. The most boring answer is probably the correct one. it was slightly easier to type and kids are naturally flexible.
I've heard it referred to as a "flex," basically doing something stupid to rub it in that you can get away with it.
Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.
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.
in any case, i prefer to decide whether someone has the "emotional maturity of a child" based on what they say, not whether they push their shift key.
I have long noticed high profile people going to court with some kind of cast on, though.
"They're being mean to me." vs "theyre being mean to me".
I fear the page formatting caused an entirely respectable joke to be lost to many people
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.
This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.
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.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
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.
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 ...
Is there any thought to expanding the Freensy lineup beyond a pure clone?
Thanks for speaking up.
"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.
Of course right now we just don't know what happened.
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.
If you look at how I worded my comment, you'll see I didn't jump to any conclusion. Only you have, apparently.
(edit: Also unsurprising to see your account is two days old)
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.
I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ep4dbt/the_shamefu...
Which points to this:
https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
This characterizes it as completely unfair, and the /r/python community seems to agree.
Is there a rebuttal from the other side?
I mean kinda, but also not. CoCs just codify what the moderators think.
Even Hacker news has a CoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html its just called a guide.
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"
A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.
It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.
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.
CoCs are a tool, that can sometimes help.
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.
They are something else hijacking the legitimacy of normal justified functional articulable rules.
"If you espouse views I don't like on your personal Twitter, you can't contribute to this entirely unrelated software project."
If that individual's viewpoints somehow visibly leak into their work or professional communications, then you might have a case for complaint or concern.
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.
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.
Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.
Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.
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.
maybe someone from sparkfun could post advice for you here too...
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
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.
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.
I'm guessing that the 2-10V is to detect line break conditions?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.
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?)
I feel like I would benefit a lot if you can tell me the whole controversy if possible. Thanks in advance!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
I don't see why this would be the case at all.
Some amount of defense is appropriate just to clear the air. Maybe this has gone too far, but hey, we're all still reading. I don't even know what a Teensy is.
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
[1] https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026
[2] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
[3] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...
> 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.
> 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?
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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
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 just for being called jerks would indeed border on 'hilarious'.
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.
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.
Having read more about all of this it sort of just seems like two dudes that hate each other.
Like for example the Adafruit guy’s complaint that the Sparkfun guy was presently posting about the domain and meme thing was objectively correct, Sparkfun guy posted a screenshot of it in his thread about the Adafruit guy (it stood out because the ‘Gen X hackers want to be Spider Jerusalem’ bit made me laugh out loud. Amazing burn, no notes)
https://chaos.social/@North/115602564578051206
It’s all kind of funny because
Are these dudes going to stop hating each other? Probably not.
Will they stop talking about each other? Probably not.
Will Sparkfun cutting off Adafruit make them stop hating or talking about each other? No.
Will this decision help customers of either company? Maybe? I would guess no but we’ll see I guess.
Like it seems like they should either hire reps so they don’t have to personally interact or just sue each other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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 really about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.
Their response when you made this claim in November was “what communities?????”. Are you perhaps mixing them up with someone else? (Source: https://digipres.club/@discatte/115595517911363679.)
The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.
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.
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.
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.
The statement that is published places blame, if not accusations of criminal behaviour, on their business partner.
IOW, they already overshared with the intent of damaging the reputation of their business partner.
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.
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.
Same as saying "Behringer is a convicted paedophile": no harm if it's true, right?
That's it. Everything else is dragging the community/customers into a fight that they didn't ask for.
Is there any duty to publish anything? They could release nothing, or nothing with any details, if they have some obligation.
It would have been far better had they not published anything at this point.
I don't think that level of detail would be a privacy violation legally and imo not morally either
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".
I agree in principle, but is there an actual right to privacy in this instance?
I'm asking this in the legal sense, not a moral sense.
They already have.
> Maybe the AdaFruit founder said something unacceptable like "it's OK to be white" or "a man can't become an actual woman just by pretending that he is." That might explain the conflict.
Why would you just invent identity politics issues to be mad about?
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
My summary:
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.
He's allowing it despite mixed feelings.
Honestly the whole thing seems like everyone overreacting on both sides. Accusing someone is "doxing" because they used your first name?
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.
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.
Kind of shitty to play the victim at that point.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
Phil shouldn’t have been so aggressive in emailing Nate’s and his wife’s employers.
Sparkfun shouldn’t have overreacted by cutting off ties with Adafruit.
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.
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.”
Want some popcorn while we watch? It’s kind of nice seeing a rerun of classic drama given-
gestures vaguely
…stuff.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.spark...
What do I read to find out what this is about? And should I care?
We're only probably seeing part of the whole mess though.
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
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
nVidia used to have a much worse reputation than that.
Companies did not work with nVidia because they liked doing so.
They are inviting us to ask for the tea.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...
A lot of those come with very good support and communities as well.
All of that plus maintaining inventory nearer their customers, doing effective QC on units they ship, writing good docs, etc. means you’re getting something a lot more like a “big OEM” experience from the hardware vendor, even if you’re ordering a handful of parts.
The generic AliExpress vendors, in my experience, do not do most of those things. They all support Arduino and/or PlatformIO, and sometimes a “native” SDK like mbed, but you’re often on your own figuring out how to integrate that bare MCU with other devices you need for a complete solution. Docs are often incomplete or untranslated, and it can be hard to know exactly which chip (or associated components like onboard sensors and BME) is on there. It can change between board revisions, or even identically-named parts from different vendors.
There are other players like M5 and RAK who make nice modular platform as well, but their prices tend to be up there with AF and SF.
My primary example is this clock generator breakout: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2045
The board is open source and there are tons of options made in China, often on a purple PCB. I've had terrible experiences with them, over 50% of the purple boardss I've purchased fail to achieve PLL lock because of multiple reasons- sometimes replacing the crystal can get it locked, but sometimes the chip is just out of spec and can't get a lock. Occasionally I'll get a lock on one PLL and the board is partly useable. I've given up dealing with the hassle and now I just spend the extra few dollars to get a breakout that uses parts sourced from authorized distributors that meet quality control standards. Plus this gives the profits to the people who designed the board and released it as open hardware.
For rando parts you get from rando vendors, it’s pretty common for schematics to have mistakes, pulldown resistors to be kind of off, and other components to be low quality.
For prototype development work, I’d rather spend a few dollars to have reliable parts that can be easily reordered than spend hours or days tracking down issues in parts that can’t always be reordered.
For post-prototyping and production work, you’re probably spinning boards anyway, and your choices and risks are pretty different.
It's the closest I can get to an FPGA within my skill set.
Also, I think that Paul has been exemplary in his contributions to the open source community despite his own product having a closed component.
It's also been a good one-stop shop, if you want a little character display to go with your esp32 project they will have one, along with addressable LEDs, battery circuitry, etc.
It's a bummer both sites are melting down
In truth people will spend a lot of money paying other people to shop on Aliexpress for them so they can maintain the illusion they are above all that.
I have at least 3 paid for orders that literally just never showed up (18650 charger, and two LFP 24v chargers). It's not a huge sum of money (~$45) but it's just... gone. Poof - into the ether. It's been more than 24 months.
I also have had orders take 3+ months to actually arrive. Consistently. And some products that do show up but are absolutely unfit for purpose (ex - copper wire that IS NOT COPPER).
Given the complete lack of reliability... I now avoid aliexpress for pretty much everything.
So sure - something like sparkfun/adafruit/etc is going to charge me an overhead, but that overhead ensures
1. The product will roughly work
2. The product will show up
3. The product will show up on a reasonable timeline
----
The extra money isn't so I can have an illusion that I'm "above all that"... it's literally just setting a baseline service level that I don't mind paying extra for, because aliexpress isn't a reliable shop (and is borderline scammy as fuck).
Which ones?
I’ve dealt with Seeed and the quality of support falls far below.
Number one reason would be lead time. Adafruit always ships immediately and the transit time is short on the east coast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- This blows up in Sparkfun’s face and they lose sales for not having Adafruit so they invite them back. Or Adafruit apologies and comes back.
- Adafruit is forced to become their own distributor and be a Sparkfun.
- Adafruit finds another distributor willing to go to battle with Sparkfun.
- Adafruit is no longer available in Europe.
Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.
* 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 :)https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Respectfully, go take care of your family.
Yes, it really does seem that way to you. But only to you. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
Think of the children...
[1]: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429 [2]: https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220
That implies you asked this of some random Etsy seller you happened to be interested in purchasing a sticker from, due to general privacy concerns. However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user. Is this correct?
> there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
Nick cited [1] specific since-suspended fediverse accounts linked to you: @ptorrone@fosstodon.org, @ptorrone@toot.community, @ptorrone@cyberplace.social, @ptorrone.bsky.social, @ptorrone@mastodon.nu. Are you denying involvement with those specific alt accounts, or just vaguely suggesting there might be other impersonators out there?
I have zero knowledge of the drama beyond reading the posts here, but if this is true then that clearly falls into the harassment arena.
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.
> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.
I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!
So it's offensive comments, offensive insults, offensive jokes, etc, as I read it, with ; breaking the association.
Then you’re left with the “my tasteful nudes aren’t offensive” defense to which the response is “but they are off topic”.
Presumably that means your biometric sensing vibrator hacking tutorial is still legal.
I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow. I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.
I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
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.
Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.
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.
It's a bad look for the parties involved.
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.
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.
That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?
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.
> Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter
Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?
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.
> 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_
> 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.
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.
If truly inexcusable behavior has ensued, there are better ways to handle it. An entire profession exists to resolve them.
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.
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.
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?
You don't actually know that for a fact.
Next we'll see Waveshare and Seeed Studios have a go? Strange happenings.
This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually 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.
I think you're getting a whiff of yourself.
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.
Familiarize yourself with the 'peak male performance' meme and you'll understand my meaning.
Let me make it easy for you: She's killing it in what would appear to be a less than ideal circumstance. She's swatting down people messing with her business while raising a child.
Don't bother interacting with them. Just flag them and move on.
I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.
Public drama is DISGUSTING!
In fact for you, you can even criticize others who haven't even done anything to you. You can do it as a pure 3rd party bystander. But no one else can do it even in response to direct attack.
Super well considered philosophy there.