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SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

503 points by yaleman

by ptorrone

39 subcomments

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 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!

by RobotToaster

4 subcomments

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.

by vegadw

7 subcomments

I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.

by rlt

3 subcomments

I read a bunch of the relevant social media posts and emails and concluded that all parties are acting deeply childishly.
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.

by andromaton

2 subcomments

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.
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.

by stego-tech

2 subcomments

Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.
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.”

by sorcix

4 subcomments

The URL for this page is very generic and bound to become a 404 page. Thinking about URLs is important to prevent link rot.

by chaosprint

1 subcomments

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.

by palmotea

2 subcomments

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."
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.

by skybrian

1 subcomments

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:
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...

by disqard

0 subcomment

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.
Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.

by ramblurr

2 subcomments

Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations
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.

by iterance

0 subcomment

Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.

by angst_ridden

0 subcomment

Ignoring all this drama.
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.

by ignaloidas

1 subcomments

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.
[1]: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429 [2]: https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220

by 4ggr0

0 subcomment

after reading all of these mastodon threads and gists, something really irks me.
this ptorrone guy acts in some pretty questionable ways and constantly uses his wife and kids as a shield. if someone gets harassed out of nowhere and their kids or spouses are being dragged into it, then that's truly a horrible, shitty thing to do. but to be involved in and start flame-wars, doxxing campaigns and more and then constantly having to mention that you have a newborn when people push back sounds pretty manipulative.
smacks someone on their neck, "don't hit me back, man, i got kids and a wife!"

by gadders

1 subcomments

I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.

by hamburglar

2 subcomments

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 
  * 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 :)

by LeafItAlone

0 subcomment

This is all just very disappointing.
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.

by thunderfork

0 subcomment

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.

by qq66

1 subcomments

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?

by ajb

0 subcomment

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.
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.

by mosura

1 subcomments

The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.
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.

by dec0dedab0de

0 subcomment

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.
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.

by fennecfoxy

0 subcomment

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.
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.

by dryark

0 subcomment

I find this political mess to be interesting, but I'm not sure it's an appropriate topic of conversation for the "professional community."
It looks to me like people on both sides were bothering the other over and extended period of time and it got worse till it led to this.
Having seen similar over my career I don't understand what digging into this accomplishes besides making all sides more upset.
I do think it is wrong for the professional relationship ( continuing to sell technology ) to be ended over a personal dispute.
From where I stand it looks like Phil is attempting to defend himself by being open about what happened even though the whole situation seems unpleasant.
Besides that I think it is likely best if all sides in this just cease communicating or saying anything more and move on from the personal stuff.
My two cents.

by KronisLV

0 subcomment

> Without oversharing, recent violations include
I feel like this prevents me from trusting them, since I’ve no idea what was actually said.
Do overshare, remove victim’s information, obviously, but put who did what out there.
Same for any rebuttals, you better bring receipts instead of some vague accusations.

by cobalt60

0 subcomment

Nice take on creating a thread about freensy on SparkFun's own forum!
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...

by ddtaylor

0 subcomment

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.
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.

by barishnamazov

0 subcomment

It's amusing to me that the path for this announcement is "/official-response". That's a top level path with a generic name! :-)

by daemonk

0 subcomment

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.
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.

by verytrivial

0 subcomment

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?

by fhub

0 subcomment

It feels to me like this should have gone through private arbitration rather than public accusations.

by kmbfjr

0 subcomment

C’mon people, act like adults. Your community and your customers care far less than you think.
If truly inexcusable behavior has ensued, there are better ways to handle it. An entire profession exists to resolve them.

by Animats

1 subcomments

So the drama.
What do I read to find out what this is about? And should I care?

by drakythe

0 subcomment

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.
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.

by phendrenad2

0 subcomment

Wow, after following all of the links here, and wrap my head around this thing, it's hard to shake the feeling that this is merely the start of what will surely be a long and epic drama.

by MarcoDotIO

0 subcomment

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.

by adolph

0 subcomment

Wow, what a way to celebrate the birthday of a certain tech CEO by crashing-out in a similar way. This is very disappointing.

by elzbardico

0 subcomment

As someone from Generation-X, all of this is wildly amusing to me. Yes, I am getting old.

by dec0dedab0de

4 subcomments

Wait, does this mean that all adafruit items for sale on sparkfun.com are going to be on a clearance sale?

by camb416

0 subcomment

Such drama. I’m going back to BX-24s and dusting off the 1st edition Igoe book.

by echelon

4 subcomments

Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.
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.

by vasco

0 subcomment

Seeing how Adafruit recently misrepresented the Arduino acquisition to FUD people this is not surprising to me. Around 15 years ago they had great vibes but the recent stuff is just money grabbing.

by oytis

2 subcomments

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.

by c64d81744074dfa

0 subcomment

sigh Mom and Dad are fighting...
But seriously, this illustrates to me that Codes of Conduct are mostly suspect. This is obviously a private feud (nobody looks to be in the right here and I don't care who started what), so to pull "they violated the CoC" is pure theatre and bullshit. I'm a Sparkfun customer and I find that really disappointing.

by progbits

1 subcomments

> Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
> 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.

by likiiio

1 subcomments

I can't care less about what lead to this drama, but threatening people for building a compatible product is a shit move, sparkfun. They have every right to do this.
Not buying anything from you anymore until you back off from this stupid claim. Shame on you.

by Dangeranger

2 subcomments

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].

    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.

https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...

by jujube3

0 subcomment

Another CoC fight.

by arthurcolle

0 subcomment

Feels like a breakup. Damn that sucks, can you get a mediator maybe?
Think of the children...

by noncoml

0 subcomment

This is embarrassing and doesn’t belong in HN

by renewiltord

0 subcomment

Yet another open source drama fest. Can’t be bothered. I’ll buy the best product at cheapest. I can use two stores.

0 subcomment

by YouAreWRONGtoo

0 subcomment

[dead]

by adathrowaway

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by ddtaylor

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by cbeach

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by kuttel2

1 subcomments

[flagged]

by alangibson

1 subcomments

[flagged]

by mikkupikku

1 subcomments

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.

by calvinmorrison

1 subcomments

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".
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!

by userbinator

1 subcomments

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.

by Brian_K_White

0 subcomment

Since any such CoC violation is very much merely a claim and not a fact, this should probably be flagged.

by 1shooner

1 subcomments

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.
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.