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...
https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
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.
what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.
the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.
no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.
Respectfully, go take care of your family.
That would be the mature and professional response which ensures continued sales for you, sparkfun and PJRC.
And for Christ's sake stop arguing business issues on social media and messaging boards. What are you doing, man?! :)
Yes, it really does seem that way to you. But only to you. :)
When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.
Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.
My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.
She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.
Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.
Full recap https://opguides.info/posts/scanoss/
But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.
You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.
You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.
You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.
All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.
Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.
I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.
Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.
i replied to an email from a person whose full name was already in the email and is publicly listed on all of their sites. i said we should talk together about the pile-on. at the time, they believed we had done nfts. we never did.
i can and will apologize. i am not a double-downer. i like changing my mind. if this is the worst thing that happened to this person in their life, and a sincere apology would help, i am fully on board with that. i would mean it. why let something like this linger and turn into prolonged suffering.
there are no other examples anyone has pointed to of doxxing or misgendering. i believe i said “he.” that’s it. i am available, and they know how to reach me.
at the same time, there are people creating alt accounts, including ones using my handle. i see that pattern clearly. still, i understand what you are saying: that i should always take the higher road and be the bigger person, regardless.
my email is pt at braincraft d0t com, open to talk
Similarly if I were buying product from a supplier and they made an immature joke I found hurtful, I would probably just ignore it. If it was a recurring problem maybe I'd say "I really didn't appreciate when you <xyz>'d, can we keep this focused on business in the future?" And if that didn't solve things, I'd see if someone else could be assigned to handle the account.
I hope those examples don't minimize what either side is feeling, but I have to say that I don't feel I've seen anything in this thread that gets my blood pumping. Dealing with difficult or rude people is part of the job and part of life.
Taking things personally, especially in business, is a _very_ expensive luxury. And if that isn't convincing enough, if you still feel angry about it in a month you can usually yell at them later. But if you escalate today and feel foolish about it later, it's a lot more difficult to mend the wounds.
But not all other modes of existence are automatically unreasonable even if they are different from one's own definition of reasonable.
Even if I would opt to ignore something like that in some paticular case for whatever my reasons are, I would rarely presume to suggest that someone else should ignore something like that for whatever my reasons are.