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SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

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Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#231

Post by ptorrone »

relaxing wrote: post #223
RobotToaster wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This adds some more context I guess https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877 Honestly the whole thing seems like everyone overreacting on both sides. Accusing someone is "doxing" because they used your first name?

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. Kind of shitty to play the victim at that point.

correct "the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing"

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#232

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #61
ptorrone wrote: post #21

hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens... 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…

Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics? 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 lin…

I am completely out of loop here. I think I may have heard about adafruit once.

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!

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#233

Post by inferiorhuman »

ptorrone wrote: post #161
inferiorhuman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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.

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. either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-s…

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?

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.

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#234

Post by alnwlsn »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #89
JKCalhoun wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics? 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 lin…

I have feeling it will only hurt PJRC in the end for trusting sparkfun to sell and manage the teensy "brand"

Can't say I blame them though. Paul and Robin are two people. Sparkfun (and Adafruit) are massive by comparison and have big stores that sell the same sort of stuff in much higher volume. The Teensys are popular. Sparkfun does (or at least used to do) board assembly in-house. It seems like a perfect match on paper.

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#235

Post by hamburglar »

nikdoof wrote: post #217
hamburglar wrote: post #206

As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far: * 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 * sparkfu…

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 https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...

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.

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.

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#236

Post by drcongo »

Y_Y wrote: post #27
ptorrone wrote: post #21

hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens... 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…

Have you also been embargoed from buying shift keys?

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.

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#237

Post by fortran77 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #14

To publish such a vague statement is an obvious invitation for speculation. It seems like rather questionable behaviour itself from spatkfun. The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.

Yes. They really should have just put a notice up that they're no longer distributing AdaFruit products and direct people to Adafruit website.

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#238

Post by tedivm »

aftbit wrote: post #62
ptorrone wrote: post #21

hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens... 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…

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.

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#239

Post by napkinartist »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #114
napkinartist wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post you are replying to literally is playing the finger pointing game. They level accusations right back at spark fun. 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" 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,…

[dead]

Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

#240

Post by qingcharles »

beambot wrote: post #221
aftbit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era

What's the drama with Pebble? I thought everything was rosy since the reboot?
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