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.
SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
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Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
I had never heard of the Tim Peters incident, but I just googled it. (It's not on his Wikipedia page.) 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?
Wow, I somehow missed all that. That's horrendous. I've always felt that a code of conduct is a tool for bureaucrats to hide behind, and episode doesn't alter my view. Thanks for sharing.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0]. [0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants.
> 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.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#364I 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: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...
Drama aside, why would someone prefer Adafruit or Sparkfun products over much cheaper whitelabel alternatives from China? A lot of those come with very good support and communities as well.
Adafruit products work as advertised, and are very well documented. Sparkfun is similar though their level of documentation is (IME) a bit more hit and miss.
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.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0]. [0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants. > 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…
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.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#366hi, 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…
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: - 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 p…
I don’t know what’s going on here but it is super funny to link to [2] and only quote “hi jerks”
> 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?
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
sparkfun is the single source supplier (and now maker of the product).
Spinning an IMXRT1062/IMXRT1064 design sans the terrible Teensy bootloader should take a day or two at most. These chips have perfectly-fine ROM USB bootloaders and SWD, don't ruin them by adding extra garbage.
The layout of the Teensy 4.x was challenging as I recall with the speeds involved. But maybe you are a demigod of compact high clock designs.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a trend among tech founders, I've seen some on Twitter doing it, and then a bunch of hanger-ons copying the behavior.
I think it goes back a lot further than Twitter. 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 ove…
Corroborating. It goes way back to the early 90s IRC and MUD cultures, from which many of us sprung. Limor came to the scene a bit later, but the culture was well-established.
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. :)
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0]. [0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants. > 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…
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 has to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board? 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 ar…
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…
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:
* 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.