Incident Creator
Folks in the #UK, my old colleague Dr. Adrian Bowyer is running a petition:
"New rules for manufacturers of medical device implants
We believe it should be made illegal for manufacturers of medical devices implanted into patients to regularly charge the patient for upgrades or maintenance."
It also calls for "IP" to be released if a manufacturer fails. I feel this subject is important enough to ask you to disseminate the link. Thank you.
Incident Creator
@miki Fair point, but provided the manufacturer makes their codebase available, the legislation would give 3rd parties the option to seek those licences or patch around them. You can probably see that while possible, it would not be in a 3rd party's best interest to be deliberately obstructive when their client is seeking device approval. Particularly if there are competing component/software vendors that would actually like a slice of a market they are otherwise bullied out of.
Mikołaj Hołysz
@vik What if the manufacturer is using software / components to which they don't have full rights themselves? Nobody builds anything "from scratch" any more, and many spaces (I don't know about medical) just don't have any open source tools to go with. If the alternatives are not entering the UK market at all, having to make a completely different, from-scratch version from a single country or pay ridiculous amounts for full copyright on every single part you use, the first option is the only ones that make sense. This has the potential of removing access to all medical devices instead of making them freely available.
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