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They should be forced to fund a trust that can support all users for their lifetime.
by kadoban 5y ago
They should be forced to fund a trust that can support all users for their lifetime.
- subroutine 5y agoHow much do you reckon that would cost per user?
- kadoban 5y agoA fairly large amount, even for minimal support. If it's prohibitive to create cool medical devices due to this, the government can assist (guaranteed loans against future profit? whatever, I'm sure there's a bunch of ways to structure it). Maybe it will push these companies to make support easier as well, and Open Source parts of it where it makes sense to.
- victorronin 5y agoI am torn. On one hand, this is great idea (exactly for such cases). I feel unbelievably bad for users. On another hand. Lifetime support of technology (say 50 years) is damn expensive. Let say you need a dozen of engineers (hardware + software) + doctors to keep it going. It's 12 people * 200k salary (if you don't like this number, pick your own) * 50 years = $120M. I think you can potentially argue that you don't need a dozen people to support this. However, I think it's a fair number to support aging hardware + software. Unfortunately, such things work only with a scale. You need 10 people to support 100 customers, 20 people to support 1000 customers and 40 people to support 10000. If they got to 10000 customers, I could see them getting enough money to fund such trust. Having just 300 customers won't be enough. Looking at the crunchbase (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/second-sight https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/second-sight). They whole funding was $130M.
- staticautomatic 5y agoPerhaps this could be accomplished by making them front or insure the cost of the expected liability — being at least the cost of removing unsupported devices.