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Comment by ptorrone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I understand you're pretty upset with the situation, and I can't blame you.

But I never should be reading about any of this on public forums. It doesn't reflect well on you or Adafruit.

Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.

That's not the position you ever want to be in. Obviously.

If the situation was untenable, after your reasonable and private attempts, you should have decided to sever ties on your terms. The outcome would have been the same, but you'd be in control of the situation, and wouldn't be permanently leaving things in public view.

I'm sorry for the situation. I'm a real hot head at times, but it's something I've learned (the hard way, over and over again) that I need to control. Business is business...

I hope it works out for you and Adafruit.

> Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.

I think you've reversed cause and effect. SparkFun publicly cut off Adafruit in response to Adafruit's private contact with SparkFun. Only then did Adafruit put out a public post addressing SparkFun's vague public allegations.

there was only one product we were purchasing anything in the hundreds of units, the teensy... we had a record sales today, inquires for a new board that is open source, so i think the community and customers have made decisions too.

The Teensy is so 2020 anyways. You want to skate where the puck is going.

You will want boards of the Kendryte K230 or SpacemitK3 (best value RISC-V chips) or Puya PY32 (best cheapest MCU, takes 5V!), and a STM32P1 linux board for good measure.

You must be misunderstanding: the public post you are linking is from the party you are not talking to, and was the first publicly published thing, which if I'm reading correctly, is the sin to you.

I completely disagree. Be yourself. And broadly, if you aspire to be in charge, as opposed to a forever IC, be yourself even more!

Adafruit makes an aesthetic experience that appeals to a niche audience. It is not an hockey stick growth company. And even those that are: Everybody makes aesthetic experiences. Nobody needs hobbyist microcontrollers.

Part of the product is being on the “right side” of Internet dramas.

If part of the product is "being on the right side of Internet drama", that kinda makes me trust them even less. A perverse incentive to get involved in stupid slapfights, escalate, and lie about it...

A private email isn't internet drama: you commenting on a disagreement you are not involved in, on the internet, is internet drama.

The person you are commenting on privately communicated, the public link you are reading is the other party.

I don't mean to be rude but given that I've seen several public statements about this "situation" from Paul dating back to Nov, I think you're commenting on a less complete dataset than I am.

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