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We could never have an 'open' or cheap medical device because of the extreme level of regulations and the tendency to pretend that the laws of economics shall n

• chillingeffect 11y ago
  i'm in the medical industry and love FOSS and I've contemplated this a lot. nearly every day. I believe the way forward is with open, LGPL-style, reference designs, almost like the Red Hat enterprise model. individual companies must still be accountable and liable for their devices, but their real value-add is in the verifications and validations. The auto industry doesn't share software, but the liability model is similar in that: how to build any car is mostly known, there are few important secrets. You choose your car based on features and quality and the companies provide those validated features and quality to customer expectations. Reference designs in medical devices would especially help with the security crises we're undergoing. So you could buy, say, an insulin pump based on a reference design from a dozen different manufacturers, but your feature set and quality of materials would be up to you and your insurance company. This is the best compromise I can find which allows competition to improve quality and spur development (competition is weak in med. devices) yet allows thousands/millions of eyeballs to improve software - and therefore life - quality. The holy grail is a medical-grade embedded Linux. If any hardcore entrepreneurs want to talk with me about that, I have a lot to share on it.