Started as a rant on G+, then became too long and suited for a blog.
I do not understand why we can easily get people together with something like VideoLAN, but the moment when health is involved, the results are just horrible.
Projects either end up in “startuppy”, which want to keep things for themselves and by themselves, or we end up fractionated in tiny one-person-projects because every single glucometer is a different beast and nobody wants to talk with others.
Tonight I ended up in a half-fight with a project to which I came saying “I’ve started drafting an exchange format, because nobody has written one down, and the format I’ve seen you use is just terrible and when I told you, you haven’t replied” and the answer was “we’re working on something we want to standardize by talking with manufacturers.”
Their “we talk with these” projects are also something insane — one seem to be more like the idea of building a new device from scratch (great long term solution, terrible usefulness for people) and the other one is yet-another-build-your-own-cloud kind of solution that tells you to get Heroku or Azure with MongoDB to store your data. It also tells you to use a non-manufacturer-approved scanner for the sensors, which the comments point out can fry those sensors to begin with. (I should check whether that’s actually within ToS for Play Store.)
So you know what? I’m losing hope in FLOSS once again. Maybe I should just stop caring, give up this laptop for a new Microsoft Surface Pro, and keep my head away from FLOSS until I am ready for retirement, at which point I can probably just go and keep up with the reading.
I have tried reaching out to the people who have written other tools, like I posted before, but it looks like people are just not interested in discussing this — I did talk with a few people over email about some of the glucometers I dealt with, but that came to one person creating yet another project wanting to become a business, and two figuring out which original proprietary tools to use, because they do actually work.
So I guess you won’t be reading much about diabetes on my blog in the future, because I don’t particularly enjoy writing this for my sole use, and clearly that’s the only kind of usage these projects will ever get. Sharing seems to be considered deprecated.
Update 2021-11-18: clearly I changed my mind and kept working on glucometerutils even though I’m not working with any of the other “big” diabetes free software projects. I still think that some of them are irresponsible. More importantly, the project that was so ready to dismiss my contributions is gone.
Yes, their GitHub says that they moved to Gitlab and it looks like there’s even some movement about it this year (except it’s all in comments, not code)… but their domain expired last year and is now hosting a “hub” that is just a bunch of repurposed content for the sake of ad placement. Their API code that they were so proudly working with vendors on hasn’t been touched in four years, and of course there’s no running implementation of it.
I guess they failed at making it a startup. It’s sad that it has to come to something like this, but I guess I wasn’t far off that it was not a sustainable model.