[hamburglar]

> 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

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.

[ptorrone]

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" ...

[valdiorn]

Try this as a reply; "hello everyone. This seems to have all gotten out of hand. We want to continue selling teensy units, We've made a lot of sales working together and I want to salvage this working relationship and ensure we continue to do business together and sell as many Teensy units as possible. Why don't I, sparkfun and Paul Stoffregen get together for a zoom meeting next Monday and discuss this. At the end of the day I'm sure Paul S would prefer his product to be as widely available as possible and we want to help with that. Best regards - ptorrone".

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?! :)

[hamburglar]

Having read the whole thing in great detail, I’m going to try to give you an honest perspective. Your competitor has done nothing to you. Someone loosely connected to your competitor (used to work there) did something extremely mild to you, and you have been overreacting to it so egregiously that it splashed over into your relationship with another company, through no fault of theirs. It is now to the point that you have made a complete ass of yourself. If you had simply let it drop like an adult, Nick never would have dropped that incredibly damning (to you) email chain. You blew it.

[hamburglar]

> it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse?

Yes, it really does seem that way to you. But only to you. :)

[jacquesm]

That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.

[hamburglar]

Obviously I don’t claim to speak for everyone else when I say it only seems that way to him. I’m being tongue in cheek. But I do think it’s the wrong instinct and the fact that some people agree isn’t reason to give into it.

[vegadw]

You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:

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.

[ptorrone]

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