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Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Conservancy delivered a keynote presentation last week at linux.conf.au 2018 (LCA) in Sydney, Australia. Specifically she spoke about her multi-year odyssey to try to gain access to the source code for the pacemaker attached to her heart and upon which her life currently depends. Non-free software is having an increasingly (negative) impact on society as people entrust more of their lives to it. That software is found in an increasing number of places, both high and low, as all kinds of devices start to run fully networked microcomputers.
In her first LCA keynote 6 years ago, Karen first told the people of LCA about her heart condition and the defibrillator that she needed to have implanted. This year she described her continued quest to receive the source code for the software running in her defibrillator, and how far she has been able to get in obtaining the source code that she's been requesting for over a decade now.
Source : Karen Sandler Delivered Keynote at Linux.conf.au
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 03 2018, @06:09PM
Agreed on the semantics: it is the state of commercial affairs, not the state of the academic art.
It's not so much bean counting as it is the slippery slope. Some guys in a garage slap a thing together and get their buddies in the research lab to let them try it on some dogs - EUREKA! it works like we expected, quick get a shoestring of funding and put the tech into preliminary human trials, again EUREKA! it's doing great things in the people to. Now, it's time to really review the design and make sure it's ready to be implanted in over 100,000 people, right? Wrong. You're still on shoestrings, and the investors, the regulatory compliance experts and the marketing team are all cargo-cultists who believe the safest and most profitable path forward is to exactly replicate what's been done to-date, so the existing design is run through validation with zero changes from the initial trials and submitted to the FDA and EUREKA! - you have permission to market. Everybody is so jazzed, they run out and sell 10,000 copies. Now, the whole process is fucked. Any changes made from this point forward to "improve safety" or otherwise address potential design shortcomings are absolutely discouraged from the highest levels due to the fact that they might call into question the integrity of the models in the field, might shake confidence in the product that is delivering a reliable stream of income. As an aside, there's also a weird heart-stopping phenomenon that consistently affects 1/700 implantees, looking too deeply under that particular rug is evidently a good way to commit career suicide too... It's not good, it's not right, it's how it is. I left that company at basically the first available opportunity, but they are far from unique. If it were just a matter of counting beans, that can be overcome - the whole product production process (including software development, regulatory, etc.) costs less than 5% of the cost to get one sold... in that company at least, they spent 19x as much on sales and marketing as they did on making the devices - so, worthwhile things that increased the cost of the device a couple of percent could easily be done without raising eyebrows because the impact to the bottom line was negligible. The thing that couldn't be done was to raise any issue that might be perceived, by basically anyone: knowledgable or not, as grounds to doubt the existing product. Insanely, this included improving the existing product in any but the most obvious of ways.
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