And spare parts and built for repairability.

Batteries are practically guaranteed to degrade after a few hundred charge cycles, and totally fail after a few hundred more... with daily charging, that's a timeline of a few years.

And with all the breakthroughs in technology, we've gone from replacable batteries everywhere, even with waterproof devices, to impossible or very-hard-to replace batteries, even in large, non-waterproof stuff such as laptops.

It's interesting, because in some fashion the private industry has a practice which is designed to prevent against software obsolescence or the failure of their vendor company: Code Escrow.

I would love to see a nonprofit/NGO/TLA dedicated to getting such defunct tech open sourced. I am sure lots of great stuff gets archived in hopes of selling/licensing the IP later, and then it never sees the light of day again. To the extent such things get archived at all.

This came up in another thread here the other day in fact. And before the same guy chimes in to suggest that governments ruin everything they take on because of corruption: You're still wrong, and you can take that defeatism elsewhere.

Could something be done about "planned abandonment"?

It's too tempting a profit source.

Have the authorities change the requirements for EOL. Hearing Health companies just follow the instructions, pretty much...

R&D is financed by the profiteering. Having companies legally on the hook for abandoning their clients is a great idea, but demanding that they allow anyone else to manufacture their design is a great way of ensuring vastly fewer designs.

In practice, a lot, and I mean, A LOT of research and development in health is done by universities under government grants from the NIH.

Like this https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/university-minnesota...

Universities make good idea guys, but they're not so good at turning them into products. The foundational R is done at universities, and then sold to companies so they can do the specific R and all of the D.

"security" by obscurity is the golden standard here. You don't want to see the massive incompetence at play if everything was open.

I think, as a society, we do want to see it, slowly, over time.

Perhaps requiring they be open sourced after a point in time or to be eligible for medicaid, etc. Maybe only new ones - but eventually we need to clean this up; as we're creating a digital superfund site each time, only covered up by people disposing of them or dying.

Allowing/affording society some ability to come in, to see, to form opinions seems so elemental to progress in general.

Pay no attention to the man behind thr curtain forever & ever, everywhere, does not seem like a great strategy for keeping & maintaining a society.

Auditing is a mess more so than security by obscurity. Source: employee.

confidence through obscurity?

actually a semi interesting argument, which seems likely to be widely accurate in many places.

Gonna go out on a limb and guess that it's enough to send shivers down anyone who's heard the Therac-25 story...

A lot of OSS is used in modern hearing aids, actually. A hearing aid is closer to a small computer these days than you'd think.

They fully are computers. I wear hearing aids, and for example, one setting will glom onto voices in the stereo field and track them so the voice remains clear if they are moving around, while damping everything else.

They do quite a lot, actually. They typically have 4 settings that the wearer can opt for. Some are "smarter" than others. The one I described is one of the more advanced functions.

open source doesn’t make modifications free. who is going to take the liability of distributing modifications for other people’s medical devices even with a “no warranty expressed or implied” license? who is going to load “no warranty expressed or implied” software onto their kids brain implant?

A much better idea is to have the implant part require a standard connector, while the outside part could be upgraded later on.

Medical devices take a TON of money to develop and license, so companies aren't going to open source them.

That is exactly how they work. The implant is incredibly "dumb" and very future proof.

Exactly. The problem is that the processor is absurdly expensive, up to 10 thousand dollars range in the US if you self-pay.

...and the manufacturing price is so low it makes me physically sad to think about.

Nice, thanks for the info!

Yes, it would be convenient to treat prostetic devices as drugs and allow generics to be manufactured.