Sparkfun Splits with Adafruit

[nctnico]

Open should mean there is sufficient detail for a skilled person to reproduce the  article and make changes without constraint for want of missing details. Less than that then thanks for the details provided. But don't try to call it open.

I get your point of view and you have every right to it (and as a hobbyist I agree with you completely). Unfortunately, a lot of "business" often use "open" hardware/software as a marketing keyword and to gain attention/publicity.
But we are talking here about open hardware, not open software! So in this case we also have to define what is "skilled person" and what does that mean? What tools and materials they have access to?

I understand why for example CERN releasing every possible design/document for their particle accelerator as open-source and open-hardware does not bother them much. Good luck building those in China for cheap and selling them on eBay/AliExpress.
Okay, maybe a bad example because this is "academia" and sharing and peer review is "necessary", but the point on cloning and selling those designs still stands.

A "skilled person" has suitable skill and expertise required to take advantage of a complete specification. I do not even think a PCB design is necessary but that does make it easier for someone to reproduce the device if that is the aim of putting an open source design out there for others to make use of and adapt. That's how open designs can evolve and better meet the community needs. I look upon it very much as an exercise in Darwinian evolution.

But there is always the question as to, in the PCB example, what CAD program the design is in. If it is an expensive commercial program then it makes life more difficult. If it is in an open source program like Kicad that would have wider adoption and probably appeal to a purist. Which I am not. 3D printing probably has similar issues.

I have been involved in a project which uses a rather complex design made by CERN. It is a 12 layer PCB made using Altium and we needed to make some changes to improve EMC behaviour, mounting holes and manufacturability. Just the Altium license alone was expensive and then startup costs for production. IIRC the total costs to modify / use the open hardware design where north of 20k euro without having anything produced yet. Since 2014 CERN has pumped quite a bit of money into Kicad to reduce / avoid reliance on Altium and make their designs more accessible but from where I'm sitting, the Altium license costs aren't the biggest financial hurdle to overcome.

[AuricG]

And at the same time he is blatantly _marketing_ his new product on _every_ popular forum/site on the internet, even though this new product is completely unrelated to Teensy, and not even out yet.
I don't think anyone would get away without at least being banned on Adafruit/Sparkfun or any other forum. And definitely there would be an angry online mob defending Adafruit and saying how this behavior is unacceptable and everyone should boycott this new product.
Yet somehow people don't comment on this or don't want to in fear of poking the angry online mob or maybe just because they like the taste of that cool aid.

IMHO it is not about fear of poking the bear. It is blatantly obvious that Freensy thing is not going to see the light of day ever. It is just childish anger directed into designing a PCB and blabbering about it on internet. This whole situation is bad for Adafruit. Who wants to to business who somebody who behaves like that?

I'm on board with (not wanting) this Freensy thing to see the light of day ever... As I understand Teensy is not just a custom PCB, the value is in the software integration. So new PCB is not going to do a thing (well except drive Adafruit sales).

I'm also disgusted with how he tries to draw some pity by mentioning his family and appearing "fragile" with either starting or ending messages with completely unrelated stuff like "nothing says “new baby energy” like starting a new board at 3am and making sure no single company gets to decide who is allowed to build." and other messages that read like "please have pity, I just had a baby" that he is posting on the internet.

First of all, congratulations and wish you all the best to you and your family. You should be proud of them, swaddle them with love and give them all your attention.

But I think it's disgusting when you want to use your family to get pity/sympathy or maybe struck an emotional chord with the readers.
You are not the first and definitely not the only father/parent in this world who is balancing family and business.
Stop using your newborn/family as a shield and especially stop representing them as some sort of weird handicap or a burden, because (to me) your messages are reading like "Even though I have a baby to take care of, I'm doing this" or "Even though I'm tired/exhausted/late/slow because the baby is keeping me up and needs a lot of attention, I'm still working on X".

Realize and come to terms that you are not the only parent in the world and realize that this does not give you the right to use them as an excuse or a free pass for stupid stuff you are doing. Internet forgives but never forgets.

[thm_w]

Old article about cloned Teensys, but they didn't clone the BL: https://blog.adafruit.com/2011/02/04/counterfeit-teensy-usb-boards-not-open-source-cloned-any-way/

Projects get posted and seem to be more a "look at what I made" in order to gain attention - yet the project docs are actually a trainwreck.
Majority of the projects on hackaday.io have missing docs "Files: 0". You won't be making them. What's the point then? A bunch of noise, that site reminds of MySpace lol.

Its a place to post projects with pictures and files, if you don't like it don't use it. Plenty of people will start on a project and never finish it, the same thing happens with project threads here.
I'd rather see it like it is, with no enforced rules, than ONLY allowing finished projects where everything is perfectly documented. That is the whole point of the competitions.

Is this why OSHW has a stick up its ass? My beef - the originator, the inventor does not get a way to recoup their cash laid out for the H/W, the PCB, the builds.
Yet the company that copies it all, manufactures it - does profit from it. Wow, what an incentive to make OSHW for the masses. Adafruit and Sparkfun are competitors, not buddies.
These people seem to be exploiting those who make the designs open, in the name of nicey nice. This is just my opinion but OSHW needs a way to at least pay off the developer and not be a vampire project wanting ever more developer blood- for free.

I agree with the payment part, though do you have any proof that Adafruit has stolen and sold open source designs? They generally design things themselves in house AFAIK.
One option for commission is to sell through seeed or pcbway, but thats just for HW, and obviously doesn't guard against theft.

[westfw]

the remaining OSHW projects tend to be more open, including actual design files

Alas, it's increasingly common to see "design files" for a CAD package where you have to go "What CAD package WAS that?  Can I get a free or "hobbyist-priced" version that will let me edit the design?  How do you USE that package?
EAGLE wasn't particularly highly respected here, but it was pretty "good times" for OSHW when it was essentially the de-facto standard for publishing designs.   Too bad about its current state :-(

[abeyer]

It is better to have kids when you are young. Period. For as long as you have work, money will come in and it will dissapear no matter what. And people who don't want to have kids are idiots. There is nothing more rewarding in life.

The massive number of absolutely horrid parents in the world would seem to indicate that this isn't something we should universally want or consider better.

[EEVblog]

I've split out the Kids topics:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/kids-and-happiness/

[abeyer]

The partners having the same career/interests was done before, too, with a long thread including some statistics: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/are-technical-people-destinied-to-be-single/msg5879604/#msg5879604

[EEVblog]

the remaining OSHW projects tend to be more open, including actual design files

Alas, it's increasingly common to see "design files" for a CAD package where you have to go "What CAD package WAS that?  Can I get a free or "hobbyist-priced" version that will let me edit the design?  How do you USE that package?
EAGLE wasn't particularly highly respected here, but it was pretty "good times" for OSHW when it was essentially the de-facto standard for publishing designs.   Too bad about its current state :-(

EAGLE became the standard at the time because the free version matched the requirements of the Arduino shield and Arduino sized boards were all the rage at the time. And both major companies Sparkfun and Adafruit used it, so did every one else getting into the hobby.
But yeah, they blew it big time.

[PaulStoffregen]

The drama doesn't appear to have been about open source.  Nor CAD software.  Nor anything important.

It looks like a few very old incidents which established mistrust, followed by 9+ years of petty online criticism and arguments and bickering, plus recent misunderstand of who works for SparkFun, appears to have escalated out of control.

I've learned of this situation after SparkFun sent their letter, cutting off Adafruit's ability to buy directly (they can still buy indirectly).  I didn't directly observe any of the drama as it unfolded.  The best info I've found about what really happened is in comments on this Hacker News headline:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616488

It has 533 comments.  Many are from Adafruit.  Most are uninformed opinions or off-topic conversation.  None are from SparkFun, whose official statement says they aren't commenting anywhere else.

The apparently well informed 3rd party comments start about 2/3rds of the way down.  Most cite social network sources, so if you don't have time to read 533 comments, visually scan for links after scrolling past the first half.

Some of those linked social network conversations have links to Github Gist pages which claim to be the emails that violated a Code Of Conduct.  The offensive message may have been considered the final straw because it was sent to an uninvolved corporation's general contact address, which distributed to many other people.

All this talk of open source and CAD software is valid, but don't fool yourself into thinking that's what the drama between Adafruit and SparkFun was about.

You can find out what happened by reading SparkFun's short official statement, Adafruit's side of the story in their many comments (all lowercase messages), and the comments from people who appear to have seen this drama unfold.  If you do, I believe you'll probably be in disbelief of how drama of so little substance escalated so much.  I sure am.

[JPortici]

All this talk of open source and CAD software is valid, but don't fool yourself into thinking that's what the drama between Adafruit and SparkFun was about.

You can find out what happened by reading SparkFun's short official statement, Adafruit's side of the story in their many comments (all lowercase messages), and the comments from people who appear to have seen this drama unfold.  If you do, I believe you'll probably be in disbelief of how drama of so little substance escalated so much.  I sure am.

As if i needed another reason to stay away from anything Adafruit. Not that i care a single bit about this particular drama, but it's always frustrating seeing people that are convinced by the side that has the better marketeers and then become impervious to logic. Everything they do smells fishy (all the example about dubious actual open sourcing above) but they always get the better end of the PR battle. I left the Synth DIY scene in disgust years ago and never wanted to have anything to do with the makers (every time they tried to drag me in was to scam some VC money, and as the techie i knew would get f'd in the a in the end) because it's always about the feelings and appearance, not with the facts

Just see how the other thread started.

[thm_w]

As if i needed another reason to stay away from anything Adafruit. Not that i care a single bit about this particular drama, but it's always frustrating seeing people that are convinced by the side that has the better marketeers and then become impervious to logic. Everything they do smells fishy (all the example about dubious actual open sourcing above) but they always get the better end of the PR battle.

If you don't want to buy due to drama, thats fine. But I'd buy from adafruit, sparkfun, seeed, waveshare over qualcomm any day of the week.

Nothing "fishy" going on, the schematics, pcb, and source code is there. Whether they should post the home phone number of the person who laid out the COB on the LCD in china is a matter of debate.

[EEVblog]

The drama doesn't appear to have been about open source.  Nor CAD software.  Nor anything important.

Yes, correct, absolutely nothing to do with it. We just tend to go off on tangents in threads here 

[SiliconWizard]

The drama doesn't appear to have been about open source.  Nor CAD software.  Nor anything important.

Yes, correct, absolutely nothing to do with it. We just tend to go off on tangents in threads here 

Yes but admittedly, discussing open source/open hardware issues was more interesting than discussing drama between companies that looked like sisters but were all just competitors in the end.