Ladies and gents…that’s about all I can take for one lifetime. I can’t fight this crap anymore.
This is where I officially say adios from the Sleep Apnea community, and from the SleepyHead project that I built with a huge part of my soul.
8 years, and over 15,000 hours of volunteer programming effort, working within my limitations and finances the only way I possibly could, in months straight of intensive polyphasic-sleep-driven coding flurries where I barely got to see my wife or daughter, followed by periods of absolute exhaustion and burnout caused by the abuse received from those few overly entitled, demanding noisemaking pricks that always somehow ended up casting a bigger shadow than the mountains of love shown by the thousands of supporters who really did appreciate my work, and I’m left wondering why I bother trying to help people…. Yup. I let the haters get to me.
I truly do want to thank all of you along the way who did try to inject a little positivity and joy back, by expressing your love and appreciation for my work, helping me smash bugs, filling in bug reports with sweet wonderful details, helping hack and document data formats and protocols, supplying me with mounds of CPAP data, or even CPAP hardware, and/or helped out with donations, which were put to good use maintaining my equipment and tools, keeping my server running, and making SleepyHead a little less of a financial burden on my family. You wonderful people make working on OpenSource worth it, even when things fall apart.
But a project built out of love can’t continue to function in an environment of hate, greed and entitlement. Let it be known that the hosts of the ApneaBoard forum have finally succeeded in their efforts to hijack the SleepyHead project. They keep denying any wrongdoing and calling me a liar, yet they knew full well this would be the eventual result. What you are reading here was the inevitable result of their bullshit undermining, which I’m sure they are extremely pleased with.
If you were a SleepyHead fan, please make sure to remind AB one day what they have really taken away from me, the SleepyHead project, and Sleep Apnea community.
What really cut deepest though, was the knife in my back from one of my close friends… Arie, I’m broken over you losing faith in me like that. I knew you were eager to see the next release just as I was, but you KNEW there was big problems that needed to be overcome, and that I was working on solving them, but you only wanted to focus on the little ones. You were the one I was relying on to keep holding things together while I did my best to press forward given the circumstances, and you gave up on me.
For those genuinely disappointed over this news of SleepyHead’s shutdown, I’m sorry. My heart is totally broken, my source of motivation was the joy I got from trying to helping people, and I’m pretty sure that’s gone… I’m not burnt-out, this time I’m burnt-up. It pains me to say from this point forward in my life I will only ever again work for the same motivation that the rest of you normal folk take for granted… ie. cold hard cash. But who knows.. maybe this busted heart will heal enough one day, at least I’ll have the wisdom next time not to mess up from the beginning with poor software licencing choices that lead to this kind of bullshit.
Hopefully the next big hearted person that comes along to help your community, is a little more resilient and able to put up with more bullshit than I was… Please though, do them a favour and mercilessly defend them from the haters & entitled pricks that drag them down so perhaps by the end, they can have a little part of their heart left.
If there is one tiny bit of hard learned advice I can leave behind from all this, it would be: Friends don’t let friends release full blown complex applications under the GPL – Keep it for hacks or corporate backed stuff.
May the force be with you.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Peace out 🤘
VICE