7 ms·

I like free software as much as the next guy, but saying, "If there were free software for this project, the cost would come down." ignores that developing that

I like free software as much as the next guy, but saying, "If there were free software for this project, the cost would come down." ignores that developing that software is expensive and someone needs to pay for it. From an economic perspective (and this article is about economics), companies release software when they hope that the cost of the freeloaders is outweighed by the number of benefit additional contributors will provide. (Or that broad adoption of the software has some other benefit to the opening company.) Generally, the more broadly useful the software is, the more economic sense it makes to open the source. I see no evidence that there would be any economic benefit for any company opening the source of their very specialized, very expensive software here. So yeah, if it were free, it would cost less. OK then.

guitarbill 10y ago
> developing that software is expensive and someone needs to pay for it. or, you know, someone donates some of their time to write it. that's usually how OS works. think about how much research the person writing the article has done. if you could buy a $25 transducer off ebay, they could have put that time into writing the software.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > someone donates some of their time to write it. that's usually how OS works. Sure, those high school and university students building up their github portfolio for job interviews. The majority of serious open source projects are backed by hardware or consulting companies, and usually fade away when that support is no longer there.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    Maybe, but for hobbyist projects? IDK, seems a bit condescending or at the very least defeatist. And who knows, the hobby project might transform into a company. Does that make it an instant "serious open source project"? Got to start somewhere.
    - ksk 10y ago
      You're changing the topic. We're not talking about a general open source project with a potentially large userbase. So what you're essentially advocating is that we have to wait till a few hundred people serendipitously have enough time to dedicate to their hobby of writing control software for medical devices. And after that they have to validate the code, test it and ensure its correctness. All the popular open source projects succeeded because developers got paid. This fantasy of large scale complex projects with unpaid experts writing code, developing tests, and creating documentation, etc is just that, a fantasy.
      - guitarbill 10y ago
        > You're changing the topic. Oh really? Let's see now. > We're not talking about a general open source project with a potentially large userbase. So what you're essentially advocating is that we have to wait till a few hundred people serendipitously have enough time to dedicate to their hobby of writing control software for medical devices. And after that they have to validate the code, test it and ensure its correctness. Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software. Maybe even not that, maybe the first PoC uses an oscilloscope for visualising the data. Then someone takes e.g. a Beagleboard and dumps the data via USB into a small Python script. V2 might add a bit of a colour map with matplotlib, maybe a GUI or just live updating Jupyter notebook. That's a start. Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that > "[c]reating any device for medical purposes can be incredibly expensive, but this ignores all the other uses that ultrasounds can have in education, imaging, sports training and just for fun". Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available? You know, for fun, out of curiosity?
        ksk 10y ago
        >Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software. And anyone can already do that. Creating a prototype is like 5% of the work. Nobody really cares about it unless you can ACTUALLY use it for ACTUAL stuff. I work in industrial automation and I have several hacked-together prototypes where I'm running some scripts or software on a micro-controller. And those protypes do "cool" stuff for a fraction of the cost. But there is absolutely no way my customers would ever ever consider using a prototype PLC for anything, not even testing. So I don't think you're getting it. This isn't Linux where your end users are mostly software/technical people. Normal laypeople are not interested in testing experimental stuff like this. >Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that Because it would be unethical to produce medical diagnostic devices (or even call them that) without proper code review, validation, and so on. >Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available? Okay so yeah I totally believe you can put together a janky POS that barely works and is unreliable. But without proper validation the results such systems produce are entirely useless. > You know, for fun, out of curiosity? Yes, I agree. You can do _ANYTHING_ for your own amusement, fun or curiosity. BUT... if you want to make something that is useful to other people you have to do a bit more work. And that work doesn't come cheap.
- frozenport 10y ago
  No. Actually most useful OSS is supported by goverment funding or big companies.
- tingletech 10y ago
  I think it undervalues the donated time to say the effort would not be expensive
TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
companies release software when they hope that the cost of the freeloaders is outweighed by the number of benefit additional contributors will provide Lols, is this how you view open source?
- compiler-guy 10y ago
  I have seen enough companies weigh opening their source-code to know that is exactly the calculus many of them use. I don't pretend that a single sentence summary captures every detail and consideration though. That sentence has nothing to do with my own opinion of free software.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  How do you imagine a company evaluates the decision to open their software?
dublinben 10y ago
If all manufacturers collaborated on a single software project, they could reduce duplicated efforts. That would lower costs for all manufacturers.
- compiler-guy 10y ago
  That is an argument for private collaboration, not for broad open sourcing.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Private collaboration among competitors is usually frowned upon as illegal collusion. Contributions to a public open source project wouldn't face the same issues.
Analemma_ 10y ago
There's also the fact that most (all?) free software licenses explicitly lack a warranty and (to the extent they can) disavow any liability for problems in the product. This is a good thing (you'd be crazy to contribute to a free software project if it weren't the case), but it doesn't fly in the world of medical devices. Nobody will use a product if there's not a liability chain they can point to if it breaks and kills somebody.
- derekp7 10y ago
  By that logic, no company would be the source of any original development, because that means that they are the last stop in the liability chain. Free software could, therefore, be treated the same as in-house developed software.
  - pilsetnieks 10y ago
    No, because the profits exceed the cost of liability for commercial software.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Bob makes some software and releases it open source as is. Company X, is considering using Bob's software to release medical device Y. If the cost of developing Bob's software in house > risks of using Bob's software then they can chose to use Bob's software. They can also audit Bob's software release a patch, and then use that version saving money and reducing risks. Note, it's Company X not Bob that's taking on liability but Company X also get's profit from selling device Y.
      - Naritai 10y ago
        Don't most open source agreements ban taking code and re-using it in for-profit enterprises?
        Retric 10y ago
ska 10y ago
Free software is used in medical devices where it makes sense. Sometimes it saves money. The cost often really isn't from the writing of software, but from the regulatory, QA and hardware development typically. Which is all dwarfed by validation if you need to do a PMA, but typically devices like this will be a 510k. Software development directly is a bit more expensive that some areas, mostly because you really need to follow engineering practices (e.g. traceable V&V, full documentation, test & review practices, etc.). Usually that isn't the dominant cost of bringing a device to market.
ksk 10y ago
>I see no evidence that there would be any economic benefit for any company opening the source of their very specialized, very expensive software here. Hmm maybe if you can find a way to lock-in users so they have to always come to you for the hardware. So, one way to do that is on a project that sees a lot of source code churn, you can tightly couple it with your services/hardware. Any competition that's downstream will find it hard to keep up with your commits in addition to having to patch in support for different hardware/services.
rasz_pl 10y ago
yes, this is why we have no free open source SDR software, no gnuradio, no osmocom, no rtlsdr, not to mention lack of cheap SDR hardware .....

guitarbill 10y ago

> developing that software is expensive and someone needs to pay for it. or, you know, someone donates some of their time to write it. that's usually how OS works. think about how much research the person writing the article has done. if you could buy a $25 transducer off ebay, they could have put that time into writing the software.

pjmlp 10y ago
> someone donates some of their time to write it. that's usually how OS works. Sure, those high school and university students building up their github portfolio for job interviews. The majority of serious open source projects are backed by hardware or consulting companies, and usually fade away when that support is no longer there.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  Maybe, but for hobbyist projects? IDK, seems a bit condescending or at the very least defeatist. And who knows, the hobby project might transform into a company. Does that make it an instant "serious open source project"? Got to start somewhere.
  - ksk 10y ago
    You're changing the topic. We're not talking about a general open source project with a potentially large userbase. So what you're essentially advocating is that we have to wait till a few hundred people serendipitously have enough time to dedicate to their hobby of writing control software for medical devices. And after that they have to validate the code, test it and ensure its correctness. All the popular open source projects succeeded because developers got paid. This fantasy of large scale complex projects with unpaid experts writing code, developing tests, and creating documentation, etc is just that, a fantasy.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      > You're changing the topic. Oh really? Let's see now. > We're not talking about a general open source project with a potentially large userbase. So what you're essentially advocating is that we have to wait till a few hundred people serendipitously have enough time to dedicate to their hobby of writing control software for medical devices. And after that they have to validate the code, test it and ensure its correctness. Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software. Maybe even not that, maybe the first PoC uses an oscilloscope for visualising the data. Then someone takes e.g. a Beagleboard and dumps the data via USB into a small Python script. V2 might add a bit of a colour map with matplotlib, maybe a GUI or just live updating Jupyter notebook. That's a start. Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that > "[c]reating any device for medical purposes can be incredibly expensive, but this ignores all the other uses that ultrasounds can have in education, imaging, sports training and just for fun". Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available? You know, for fun, out of curiosity?
      - ksk 10y ago
        >Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software. And anyone can already do that. Creating a prototype is like 5% of the work. Nobody really cares about it unless you can ACTUALLY use it for ACTUAL stuff. I work in industrial automation and I have several hacked-together prototypes where I'm running some scripts or software on a micro-controller. And those protypes do "cool" stuff for a fraction of the cost. But there is absolutely no way my customers would ever ever consider using a prototype PLC for anything, not even testing. So I don't think you're getting it. This isn't Linux where your end users are mostly software/technical people. Normal laypeople are not interested in testing experimental stuff like this. >Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that Because it would be unethical to produce medical diagnostic devices (or even call them that) without proper code review, validation, and so on. >Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available? Okay so yeah I totally believe you can put together a janky POS that barely works and is unreliable. But without proper validation the results such systems produce are entirely useless. > You know, for fun, out of curiosity? Yes, I agree. You can do _ANYTHING_ for your own amusement, fun or curiosity. BUT... if you want to make something that is useful to other people you have to do a bit more work. And that work doesn't come cheap.
frozenport 10y ago
No. Actually most useful OSS is supported by goverment funding or big companies.
tingletech 10y ago
I think it undervalues the donated time to say the effort would not be expensive

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago

companies release software when they hope that the cost of the freeloaders is outweighed by the number of benefit additional contributors will provide Lols, is this how you view open source?

compiler-guy 10y ago
I have seen enough companies weigh opening their source-code to know that is exactly the calculus many of them use. I don't pretend that a single sentence summary captures every detail and consideration though. That sentence has nothing to do with my own opinion of free software.
EpicEng 10y ago
How do you imagine a company evaluates the decision to open their software?

dublinben 10y ago

If all manufacturers collaborated on a single software project, they could reduce duplicated efforts. That would lower costs for all manufacturers.

compiler-guy 10y ago
That is an argument for private collaboration, not for broad open sourcing.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Private collaboration among competitors is usually frowned upon as illegal collusion. Contributions to a public open source project wouldn't face the same issues.

Analemma_ 10y ago

There's also the fact that most (all?) free software licenses explicitly lack a warranty and (to the extent they can) disavow any liability for problems in the product. This is a good thing (you'd be crazy to contribute to a free software project if it weren't the case), but it doesn't fly in the world of medical devices. Nobody will use a product if there's not a liability chain they can point to if it breaks and kills somebody.

derekp7 10y ago
By that logic, no company would be the source of any original development, because that means that they are the last stop in the liability chain. Free software could, therefore, be treated the same as in-house developed software.
- pilsetnieks 10y ago
  No, because the profits exceed the cost of liability for commercial software.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Bob makes some software and releases it open source as is. Company X, is considering using Bob's software to release medical device Y. If the cost of developing Bob's software in house > risks of using Bob's software then they can chose to use Bob's software. They can also audit Bob's software release a patch, and then use that version saving money and reducing risks. Note, it's Company X not Bob that's taking on liability but Company X also get's profit from selling device Y.
    - Naritai 10y ago
      Don't most open source agreements ban taking code and re-using it in for-profit enterprises?
      - Retric 10y ago

ska 10y ago

Free software is used in medical devices where it makes sense. Sometimes it saves money. The cost often really isn't from the writing of software, but from the regulatory, QA and hardware development typically. Which is all dwarfed by validation if you need to do a PMA, but typically devices like this will be a 510k. Software development directly is a bit more expensive that some areas, mostly because you really need to follow engineering practices (e.g. traceable V&V, full documentation, test & review practices, etc.). Usually that isn't the dominant cost of bringing a device to market.

ksk 10y ago

>I see no evidence that there would be any economic benefit for any company opening the source of their very specialized, very expensive software here. Hmm maybe if you can find a way to lock-in users so they have to always come to you for the hardware. So, one way to do that is on a project that sees a lot of source code churn, you can tightly couple it with your services/hardware. Any competition that's downstream will find it hard to keep up with your commits in addition to having to patch in support for different hardware/services.

rasz_pl 10y ago

yes, this is why we have no free open source SDR software, no gnuradio, no osmocom, no rtlsdr, not to mention lack of cheap SDR hardware .....