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Those that are just hand waiving that this is just “drama” either don’t understand what is going on or actively support harassment and bullying. According to what I’ve been able to understand, Sparkfun has been allowing its employees to make harassing and derogatory internal presentations targeting Adafruit employees for years. When this was brought to their attention Sparkfun did nothing. When Adafruit started probing Teensy customers for what they liked about the product Sparkfun decided to enforce a code of conduct violation and terminate supplying Teensy boards to Adafruit.
I didn’t read through all the public messaging but I have read enough to know it would have been easy for Sparkfun to do the right thing and discourage their employees from their harassing behavior, even if it remained internal. I don’t want to support that kind of business. It makes it clear to me that Sparkfun is a boys club that is threatened by competition and would rather throw insults than make a better product.
Adafruit has been inventive, inclusive, and added joy and whimsy in a field that is so often filled with toxicity.
So instead of selling on both Sparkfun and Adafruit, having what seems like a monopoly on Teensy style boards, Sparkfun decided it would be smarter to stop selling to Adafruit and force their hand to make an open source competitor
That’s an interesting business decision…
Yeah, there is more going on here than PJRC, Sparkfun or Adafruit are telling us. In no universe does simply cutting off a revenue stream make sense.
I keep seeing the word “drama” thrown around. I suspect it’s not taking place in an online forum, but in the real world.
Guess I’m not buying anymore sparkfun stuff.
Shame.
This is big stupid drama but there’s a long thread about it on hackernews.
Don’t really care about the drama, but I can appreciate this:
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.
Meh, it’s sort of an empty gesture, as discussed in the HN thread. The “competitor” is a somewhat-compatible Teensy 3 clone that uses a different processor with roughly similar cpu performance. It doesn’t compete with the much faster Teensy 4 which is the only model that PJRC currently sells. And these types of boards aren’t generally about CPU performance anyway. If you want fast computing, get a Linux board or similar. These boards are about stuff like analog i/o.
Jan 14, 2026 – Looks like SparkFun (Nate) is trying to drag Limor and I on hackernews, here is the post and discussion. And… Paul maker of “teensyduino” for the Arduino-compatible teensy, emailed and said there is “concern” about us saying teensy-compatible for the future unreleased unnamed open source alternative.
That not cool, bro.
Sigh. Bigger ecosystem for the rest of us I guess.
Sone major drama on chaos.social as well
I’m not understanding that thread. Could someone explain?
Everyone in this drama is guilty of being a drama queen.
