I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.
Those guys migrated to Rust and are too busy pleasing the borrow checker now
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SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
531–540 of 591 posts
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#532hi, 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…
you just called out nate, which is the thing he specifically won't do to you, phil.
you have scraped sparkfun.com plenty. I know, I've seen the server logs.
regardless, there is no longer private drama.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#533hi, 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…
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun. 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.
there would be no limor without nate. fact.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun. 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.
there would be no limor without nate. fact.
That makes his conduct is even worse
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0]. [0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable. 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 a…
The problem is once you get into concrete specifics, you enter the realm of legal liability and potential libel, so it's all posturing until their adrenaline runs out, then they'll either reconcile (or not) behind closed doors.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#536Earlier 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.
Not just tech founders. Jeffrey Epstein writing is just atrocious. Like how does anyone habitually use a commas ,, like this? I've heard it referred to as a "flex," basically doing something stupid to rub it in that you can get away with it.
"Dictated but not read"
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era
> Arduino joining the dark side What happened?
Now owned by Qualcomm, not exactly know for their open source friendly attitude.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#538hi, 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…
Teensy's closed bootloader, USB stack, hardware design are what is proprietary. But the toolchain is open. Eg: I can use PlatformIO, etc.
From my perspective an open alternative would splinter the community rather than replace it. Developers value Teensy's polish & consistency (PAnd this is Paul Stoffregen's discipline).
If you endeavor to follow this path, you'd see adoption from transparency advocates and research/security-focused devs, but pragmatists like myself would stick with what works and what's affordable.
Your real problem is replicating that engineering rigor in an open-source project, is a lot harder than it looks. Let me give an example; STM32 is more open but shows us exactly what fragmentation looks like without unified vision.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like the allegations are for things that was be illegal in nature. I think the expected way to handle something like this would be to write the calm factual email. If that goes nowhere then sue them. I don't think the public airing approach is the right one.
It’s difficult to prosecute online harassment, and “hate sites and photoshopped images” aren’t illegal. There’s a right to freedom of speech in the US.
Further the 'hate-' prefix in an accusation makes it one I immediately tune out.
It's just a manipulative word that lets you incite people while not actually revealing what was said.
Re: SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Both Adafruit and Sparkfun manufacturing quality is higher than generic manufacturing from China. I suspect that most of the Chinese alternatives meet their price point by using parts that are out of spec and were purchased at a discount by the chip manufacturer (or just scrounged for free from the reject pile). My primary example is this clock generator breakout: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2045 The board is op…
I've also learned the hard way that breakout boards from Chinese retailers that look like the real thing but cost less than the price of the component from DigiKey in bulk are a pile of crap.
Whilst it is great that the hardware is open, I have come to the point of not caring that much as it just seems to mean that the market gets flooded with things that look very similar but are terrible. And in the case of that Si chip, it's really just the reference circuit from the manufacturer from what I see.