> More importantly: If you require that medical devices be supported indefinitely, you will heavily discourage anyone from making medical devices. Such a requir

> More importantly: If you require that medical devices be supported indefinitely, you will heavily discourage anyone from making medical devices. Such a requirement is an endorsement of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.[1] Had this company not existed, these people would have been blind for the rest of their lives. Instead, this company tried to help people and ran out of money. The net effect is that blind people were able to see for years. This is much better than the alternative. I absolutely agree, which is why that is not even remotely what I proposed. Rather than require indefinite support, we should require that support be made possible by the owners of devices, or, when this is too technically demanding, anyone with the know-how and desire to help (out of kindness, profit motive, whatever). Currently, this is very difficult because devices tend to require proprietary information to maintain (such as software). Thus, I believe it should be a legal requirement to open-source and make publicly available the materials needed to maintain/modify/repair the device (e.g. firmware, internal tools) once you've stopped supporting it. Right now, maintaining an unsupported device requires serious reverse-engineering skills, and usually plying those skills for that purpose is illegal under the DMCA's anti-subversion rules. I believe such a measure to be necessary to reduce the insane amounts of waste companies create by releasing proprietary devices and then obsoleting them so that they will inevitably stop working, but the mere existence of cases where a device is critical to some function (like a medical implant) constitutes another compelling reason why this requirement is necessary, even if this particular article about this particular device is somehow misleading I will add (because it's fun to be provocative on the internet) that this is, I think, a reasonable compromise from the position I hold emotionally (which is that all proprietary software is a user-hostile scam and should be outlawed in its entirety) which still accomplishes not leaving devices that have lost support inoperable junk EDIT: I'd like to add that it's super uninteresting to me to talk about "malicious intent" with respect to corporate actors. They're not people, they have no capacity for malice. I don't believe such an entity's intentions ever matter. They are machines built out of rules and only ever are guaranteed to serve the purpose of trying to make someone money. This is fine, but it's important to ensure that they are built safely, as with any machine