Recently, someone contributed a library to help with the webification (<- clearly this is a real word) of VA VistA. In a recent HardHats thread, he expressed his discouragement. I responded and I thought it might help other discouraged developers out there to read me reply. Sometimes the Open Source community just does not respond to good contributions. Here is some of what he wrote:
Can I ask the question: 9 months after having going out of my way to
make it available as Free Open Source to try to provide this community
with a state of the art tool for Ajax development, is *anyone*
actually using EWD with VistA yet? I have to be honest and say that I
do wonder sometimes why I bothered. All I seem to hear is reasons why
people haven’t used it or don’t use it.
Jim,
Working with the FOSS health community can be very trying. I fully understand how you feel. I felt that way in the early days of FreeB, which has still not been adopted by the VistA community.
Here are some basic insights about how to get things done in the FOSS Health IT community.
- You have to be prepared to fully ignore the peanut gallery. There will always be people who have no idea what it means to develop making comments as though they were developers. This is actually a negative side-effect of something positive: this community basically treats clinical users and software administrators as equals. That is a wonderful thing but it means that contributors like you have to learn to ignore people who are not really in your target audience.
- Your audience is developers, a small subset of this community. Developers are typically very circumspect group and are often lurkers on Hardhats and elsewhere (I am a notable exception to that rule).
- Developers never have any spare time, we always have something worthwhile that we are working on. That means for your software to get attention, it must win out over other interesting projects for any given developer.
Without presuming to speak for the rest of the development community here, I personally cannot afford to spend time on time-sink projects. Frankly, until Astronaut arrived -as a shared development environment- VistA as whole fell into this category for me. Once you get EWD working in Astronaut then it will be a different ball-game. Then a developer like me, who has very little time, can still afford to evaluate your library for potential projects. If you want an even wider audience, you should try to get EWD included, fully working, out-of-the-box in OpenVistA. Not every developer feels this way, some of them are entranced with the hard way, preferring to compile everything they can themselves from scratch just to be able to say they did.
For VA VistA there are two phases of adoption, first the VistA platforms, and then the developers who rely on those platforms. You are still at the first stage, and you should expect that only the VistA Demigods will even look at your stuff before the platforms adopt it. There are very very few VistA Demigods, which explains the reaction that you are seeing. Once the platforms have adopted your code, mere mortals like myself will consider using it for various projects. There are lots of mere mortals in the FOSS Health community. Do not get discouraged about how things are going now. You should only be discouraged after about a year of inactivity -after- the VistA platforms include your code. At that point I would assume that some other webify-VistA strategy had won out.
This is -not- a criticism or meant to imply that you have failed at anything. You have done some great work, and that is true if your code becomes popular or not. Sadly, the best code does not always make the most popular projects or vice-versa. FreeB eventually became popular, but it was certainly not because it was good code. Success in Open Source is very often an accident of history. Your code might not take off the way other code has. But no one has control over that. Even people with successful projects did not -know- that they would be successful. Everyone has to do just what you did, put your code out there and see what happens.
For my part, I have as much respect for you as I do for the pioneers of our movement. People like Torvalds, Larry Wall, Stallman, and that ilk. It is worth keeping in mind that they got famous because their technical approaches -happened- to win out. But when they started they had to stick there necks out there just like you are. I will not lie and tell you that the reputation gains that you will get will ever approach the benefits that those people enjoy. Even if you are a success in the FOSS Health community the best you can hope for reputation wise in the FOSS Health movement is a LinuxMedNews award, and even that will probably not happen unless your project succeeds. For every project that “wins” in Open Source there are ten or perhaps even more that die on the vine (take a look at the stats on sourceforge) do not be offended if that happens to you, it means nothing.
Community members who have a clue about this will still give you plenty of credit for your work, and you will be surprised how loyal even a small group of users can be. You may have people seeking you out for years to get consulting on your project, even if it never really gets off the ground! In any case, those of us who have gone through what you are going through will always be quick to recognize a fellow contributer and give you the respect and appreciation that your work deserves. We do this because we recognize that your actions take courage, and unless lots of people continuously find the courage to risk what you have, our community will begin to rot.
To sum up: Do not let the turkeys get you down, be patient, and if your project ultimately fails remember to make like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
-FT