ptorrone

limor & i posted a statement last night (below). as you have seen, anyone can tag/email the founder of flux ai, the board member (8vc), and the board member/vc and ask them to reach out to limor if they want to go on a pod' or resolve this openly together to set a good example on a dispute. if the most powerful people in the world with all the resources and advice (fenwick) cannot talk, and solve this, who can?

On Responsible Security Disclosures and Free Speech

Adafruit has worked with our longtime employment firm and team to make sure there is indemnification for all employees and contractors reporting responsible security disclosures at Adafruit. This is not any different… it only makes it more clear that the bad actors and companies that try to use responsible disclosure as a way to chill free speech will not stop us from publishing facts, or even the answers to an interview with a startup that makes lots of questionable claims.

–Ladyada, pt – Adafruit, June 9, 2026

https://adafruit.com/flux

update jun 3, 2026

Before issuing any public response, and before involving the press - Limor wrote directly to Flux’s founder, Matthias Wagner. Not through lawyers. Founder to founder.

She proposed: a podcast of his choosing, open questions and answers, with the community watching and taking part. She offered to keep Phil off the podcast.

Her words:

“Before we both spend lots of time and money embroiled in a legal dispute, I would like to explore with you a way to reconcile things and perhaps turn this into a positive… adults with good intentions can work together and solve them… Cooler heads can prevail and we could set a good example for the community, building a future together where everyone can make and share electronics.”

She followed up the next day, again.

That offer stands. We would still rather build than litigate, and we would still rather talk in the open. We think that is how this should work - between two companies who both believe anyone with a browser should be able to make electronics, we can set a good example together.

We will update the community, and will still look forward to sharing our story.

- ladyada & pt

new "altaccount2026" only posting twice, today, about this. we are very much looking forward to sharing our story, very very soon.

if you "altaccount2026 " really want a twitter archive of my photos of my kids, puppets, links to my articles, posts, and more, it may be available on some archiver.

we are very much looking forward to sharing our story.

press@adafruit.com for inquires ...

limor and phil here, we would 100% welcome it, looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor

new empty "altaccount2026" with only this post, hi.

please email press@adafruit.com , limor and i are looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor

hi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email press@adafruit.com

limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.

"one dude's little devboard company" ... that "one dude" is limor fried, who's been shipping open hardware since 2005, and before that from her MIT dorm room...

webserial in firefox happened because a bunch of people and companies, adafruit included, shipped code, fixed bugs, made open hardware, and did the standards grind.

clicking the name/link of the comment (kotaKat) ... defending right-to-repair, foss, anti-drm, anti-walled-garden.

someone ships open source hardware and software that work together... and you shit on it.

join in and tinker, share code and projects ... or stay addicted to being miserable. if you cannot see this as a positive, nothing will ever be.

hi hi!

firefox 151 and zen 1.19.13b (Firefox 150.0.3)

https://cdn-blog.adafruit.com/uploads/2026/05/151vs150-scale...

zen is on 150 firefox and firefox is 151, when zen updates to 151 should be the same as firefox 151.

there is not some conspiracy to stop you personally from visiting adafruit.com, if you are still having problems, email me, i am the author, i can send you just about any form of text in almost any way? ... that message is probably some cloudflare message if the site is getting hammered... like it is now, i can look into it...

this isn’t an adafruit-specific stance, it’s a web-wide problem. automated scraping and bot traffic is enough to take independent sites offline, and cloudflare is a tool we use to keep the site available at all. we publish full-text rss with no blockers here: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss . if cloudflare trips on your browser and you want an article, email me and i’ll send it in whatever format you want, we're always working to make it easier, it's hard, would rather have help than snarks and dunks.

(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.

the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss

the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?

if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.

we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.

(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.

the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.

the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss

the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?

if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.

we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.

i am the author of the article.

the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.

the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss

the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?

if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.

we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.

a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business, "This message is to formally confirm that SparkFun Electronics intends to issue applicable royalty payment for Q4 2025 no later than January 31, 2026, in accordance with previously established timelines."

i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.

the person said we are "autistic new york jews"

not everyone who works at adafruit works in our industry city, brooklyn factory. we've been doing remote before it was a thing, you can check out our shows or ask before assuming the worst, but whatevers, you made up your mind and want us to move to florida.

i’m catching up here. we have two kids. i dropped one off at pre-k this morning.

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

disagree, and we are not autistic.

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.

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.

user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...

the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior. i contacted them privately using an email address they themselves used on the site they used, specifically to ask for a stop to the pile-on and to see whether there was a constructive way to resolve their grievance. their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.

with respect to sparkfun, yes, i sent a direct email to the founder, and ceo (and contacts i have there) calling out what i believe is a long-standing bully culture tolerated at the top. calling a company out for behavior is not harassment, even when the language is blunt. during this same period, fake accounts using my handle appeared and mass-reporting was clearly underway. my real account was likely caught up in that. retroactively attributing moderation actions for saying their first name on their email is inaccurate.

the various bans you cite did not occur after some calm, independent review of facts. they occurred in the middle of coordinated reporting, they said so.

as for etsy, i asked a seller who was publicly accusing me of “doxxing” a question: would placing an order would expose my personal information? that was it, there was a sticker in my cart already, i know this maker's work. etsy declined to take action that i know of, i just an etsy order, no ban (i did not buy the stickers). recharacterizing that as harassment is another example of inflation through repetition.

what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade. i am not doing that anymore. drawing a line cost us purchasing a closed source board that only sparkfun makes, so we're doing an open source version.

some are already words/abbreivations that are in my word list and some are me typing over later when i can, and some is a cut/paste if limor has something for me to add or does an edit as she looks at things. you can see my writings on the adafruit blog have caps, commenting on forums or hackersnews quickly, there will be some things someone does not like. we were at the doc with our 2 month old during this ... https://x.com/ptorrone/status/2011509017814659095

i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already. there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.

it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...

sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!

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.

correct "the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing"

we are sticking with open source, arduino has moved away from that and sparkfun has an open-source certification revoked due to not being open source.

why talk about limor's appearance?

sparkfun is the single source supplier (and now maker of the product).

it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.

either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?