Thirteen years, teenager, he/she/it VSCP & Friends becomes thirteen today. Thirteen man years. No remarkable development time for IBM/Google/Microsoft and others. They can do this in a month. They just insert the right amount of people into the project. However, as a sole developer as me, it is a difficult and a crazy long time, 600 000 lines of code is 130 lines per day, every day of the year, for thirteen years, xmas, holidays and any other days included. Post install scripts, firmware examples, support, manuals and thinking added to that. There is a lot of time and energy put into this project. All just to prove a vision that I had in the early 80s. To build small devices that can communicate with each other without a server and which can be installed, detected and configured in an easy way and used by ordinary people. IoT and M2M buzzwords of today, the technology has become popular in the world, hyped, but not here in the woods in the middle of Sweden, where I’m sitting, of course not.
Had I known then, in August 28 of 2000, that it would take this long to realize my vision, I had never started this, NEVER! But there are and has been people around the world who have been a huge support and made it worth continuing, people on all continents that have become close friends over the years. But even more people have not believed in the project, of course, its always that way. How many rejection of the project have I received over the years? They can not be counted. How much money have I myself put into this project? How many last places in the competitions has the project received? How many angel investors have moved past my booth without even looking at the logo?
A long time I really thought I would get to say to those who say no and rejected the project, that “there you see, I was right,” but after a while you realize that happy endings only exist in movies. You have to find the energy to continue anyway. One must throw them all out, the people that just takes energy without giving back – the open source projects energy thief’s, always there – and then wander on by yourself as you always did towards a goal that no one other than you yourself believes in. That’s when it helps to be crazy. It is not possible otherwise.
Right now I’m working on a release again of VSCP & Friends. This will probably not be the last either. With this release, the user interface, which I have been asking and begging over the years for other people to help me with (because I’m poor at HTML5 and Javascript), is in place. My vision is realized at last. The project has reached all the way after thirteen years. Not finished by far. It will never be. But the pieces are in place and can be used completely free of charge and free and open for those who want.
When you become thirteen you also become a bit tougher. A teenager with attitude as well. More rock and roll. Prices and investment capital is likely to go to others also in the future. As someone said “it’s laughable when it is called Very Simple Control Protocol when the specification is in the hundreds of pages.” But every word that’s in that specification is there to make sure that things built around VSCP can be small, nice and easy for the **end user** to use. The designer and constructor may well need to chew specifications, it’s there job, this is built for the end user experience alone. I am so tired of self-righteous engineers’ systems that only gets trickier and trickier and trickier to use for every day and for eternity in stupidity for us all. VSCP is a way to make things more user-friendly and self-configuring. Things that can themselves tell the user how to configure them and also help the user step by step with the configuration. They can tell that they are available. They can present information and can be controlled in the same way for all devices. They can talk to each other. They contain the user manual within themselves and phone numbers/ email/web address of manufacturer/support and all other information you sometimes need but can not find when it is needed. Just as it should be. Easy. Simple to understand. Beautiful.
So congratulations VSCP & Friends today at your thirteenth anniversary. May the world see your teenage beauty.
2013-08-28, Los, Sweden
Ake Hedman
Maintainer of VSCP & Friends