For years Sleepyhead was widely used by sleep apnea patients to view a more detailed analysis of their CPAP stats and reports. The software was created and founded by Mark Watkins AKA Jedimark. Unfortunately through lots of disagreement, mistrust, and drama, Mark Watkins decided to close his Sleepyhead project and no longer continue working it.
But now that he has closed down Sleepyhead, a new project from other developers has emerged called OSCAR. Oscar will continue to provide sleep apnea patients with detailed information that they can’t access otherwise. I don’t have first hand knowledge of what actually went down to bring an end to Sleepyhead, but I will share what I know and hope to bring clarification to the situation.
What is Sleepyhead Software?
Sleepyhead is an open source software that allows CPAP users to view their CPAP date in a more detail. Open source means that it is free and open to the public to make or create changes to the code. This is similar to WordPress. Sleepyhead was created by Mark Watkins aka Jedimark.
The software that came right from CPAP manufactures to view data is often limited and very clumsy. The data it gives tells a very small story of what a patient experience when they sleep at night with their CPAP.
Can you still download Sleepyhead?
As of right now, you can still download Sleepyhead at sleepyhead.jedimark.net. It hasn’t been worked on or updated in quite some time, so it might have bugs and glitches that might not work with your computer or CPAP data.
If you want to download software now, it is best to download OSCAR which is taking the Sleepyhead software continuing to build it and make it better. I will talk more about OSCAR later in this article.
Why did Sleepyhead shut down?
Like I said earlier in this post, I don’t have any direct experiences with any of the parties involved. All the information I am giving I have read or heard about and will try to be unbiased as possible.
Jedimark’s side
On February 8th, 2019, Jedimark wrote a post you can see here announcing that he was shutting down Sleepyhead. He talks about his 8 year journey pouring in 15,000 + volunteer hours to build Sleepyhead to benefit the sleep apnea community. He says despite thousands of happy people that showed they appreciated him, others were not so kind.
He spent countless hours fixing codes for a small number of people with high demands that would cast a shadow over his true fans. He admits to letting the “haters” get to him.
Next he goes on to say that people at ApneaBoard.net “hijacked” his project and that this has been a longterm plan by them. They were planning behind his back to take Sleepyhead away from him.
In particular, he calls out one of his former friend’s named Arie. Jedimark talks about having to overcome certain problems (not sure if professional or personal) and Jedimark was working to overcome. He claims Arie gave up on him and he calls this his “deepest cut.”
Apneaboard and New Developers’ side
One of the leaders who run ApneaBoard.net had a much different side. He says Jedimark has made thousands of dollars every year off of Sleepyhead and Apneaboard itself did a donation drive where they raised $5,000 for him to help further develop Sleepyhead. The idea of Jedimark building Sleepyhead out of the “goodness of his heart is naive.” But he also says he understands why an outsider with no first hand experience with the situation can see that.
He claims that although Mark Watkins was the one that originated the Sleepyhead code, he wasn’t the only one that worked on it. There were many developers who contributed to further build Sleepyhead. Jedimark was quite possessive of the code and was always worried about any developers getting too close. Although Jedimark benefited from having developers help him, he treated them like “dirt” and creating an angry environment.
If a developer got too close to the code or was trying to help so that Sleepyhead could be used on more CPAP devices, Jedimark would say that “no one understands the code like him” or “you are messing with MY code.” All of this, even despite he released it as an opensource software that is meant to be freely shared and distributed.
In other cases, if a developer started to understand the code, he would kick them off the project, but only after they provided the code they were working on.
He still accepted their help and greatly profited from thousands of donations every year that went straight to his personal paypal account.
Overtime, this created a hostile environment and one by one the developers left the project leaving him all alone to work on the project. Jedimark retaliated by posting on forums saying the the developers and Apneaboard have stolen Sleepyhead.
There was no active software developments planned except for the ones under Jedimark’s leadership when he made those accusations. There was a discussion in January 2019 on the possibility of there might be a fork in the road down the line because of Mark’s bad attitude. This was a discussion that was public to view on Apneaboard.
Mark took this as a hostile takeover attempt and they stole Sleepyhead when in reality no such thing had occurred. Although Apneaboard was not involved, the discussions by the developers happened on Apneaboard. Jedimark lumped Apneaboard with the developers even though they had no direct involvement with them.
With only Jedimark left to keep Sleepyhead alive, he could no longer continue the project because it was too big for one person. All the talented developers trying to help him left because of the toxic environment. Not only that, but Jedimark hasn’t contributed substantially to the code in quite some time, and all the recent big updates were done by other developers.
This lead to Jedimark posting in February 2019 that he was no longer working on the project. With this announcement, the developers at that time decided to move on from Jedimark and Sleepyehead and continue the project on their own. Apneaboard was asked to be a venue to help build the next version of Sleepyhead, which became to be know as OSCAR.
The developers now have a private forum on Apneaboard so they can continue to build OSCAR into the future.
Lankyleft27 posted a informative YouTube video on the situation that you can view below
Conclusion
I appreciate Jedimark’s work on Sleepyhead. His software has let me view data I could not view before. There was no other software like his at the time for the general sleep apnea patient. Unfortunately, developers left his project (whether justly or unjustly) because of his toxic attitude to create Oscar.
I don’t really understand Jedimark being so possessive of software that he released as opensource (which makes it free for people to do whatever they want) but it sounds like he might have regretted that and wished he kept the software private.
Although I am sad that this internet drama happened, I am excited for the new features and access Oscar will bring.
